AIDS issues and support

Why Is ‘TB-Alert UK’ Not Warning
About XDR-TB In South Africa?
By Adriana Stuijt
Exclusive to Rense.com
6-5-7

THE NETHERLANDS — The following message was sent by retired SA medical journalsit Adriana
Stuijt to the TB-Alert UK organisation (email: awaren…@tbalert.org) — as follows:

"As a retired medical journalist in South Africa who covered the Aids-epidemic from its very
start in 1984, I believe that the SA government is deliberately keeping silent about the
out-of-control XDR-TB epidemic which is now entering the mainstream population in this country
and even beginning to kill previously healthy people. Their last official news update with the
latest death-toll figures date back to April 2007. From my own information, at least 1,000
people have already died in SA of XDR-TB thus far and enb estimated new 30 patients a day are
being diagnosed with it countrywide, in every SA province. And those are just the patients who
report to TB- clinics: the World Health Organisation warned just a few weeks ago that they
don’t know exactly how widespread XDR-TB has become in South Africa.

"Shouldn’t TB Alert be warning very actively in many high-profile TV and news media interviews
about the fact that more than 1,054 people per 100,000 of the KwaZulu-Natal population are now
being diagnosed as infected with XDR-TB? At least two TB-hospitals are so overrun with XDR-TB
patients now that they have turned their entire hospitals into XDR-TB hospices – sending
‘ordinary TB’ patients to other hospitals for treatment.

Isn’t TB-Alert UK worried about the fact that the SA government is so anti-science that it now
is actually suing a TB-hospital in Gauteng with demands that they release thirteen so-called
‘forcibly detained’ XDR-TB patients because their ‘human rights are being violated?"

The management of Sizwe Hospital for tropical diseases in Johannesburg won’t release these
patients because they are untreatable with existing medicines and thus remain highly
infectious — they continue to pose a dangerous health risk to society if they were to be
released. View the SA state-broadcaster SABC-TV’s news item about this class-action law suit
against Sizwe hospital in Johannesburg here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zz5lI3Hc5Xc

It is very clear to me by now that the South African government maintains such an unscientific
and indeed confused policy towards the XDR-TB epidemic that this confusion is allowing this
untreatable and very deadly strain to spread very rapidly into the entire population – not only
hiv-infected or/and TB co-infected people are dying from this, but also previously perfectly
healthy people now get it from their own home environments. XDR-TB has escaped from its
previous TB-hospital setting and entered the general population, TB-experts are warning in the
Western Cape area, where the fifth patient has just died.

My contacts in SA inform me that XDR-TB is also terrifying the population at large mainly
because the SA authorities send out such confusing signals: terrified ‘ordinary TB" patients
and nursing staff even fled from hospitals as soon as XDR-TB patients arrived; and in some
provinces such as Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, XDR-TB patients are increasingly sent home for
"treatment" because there aren’t enough hospitals beds to accommodate them all. This particular
strain called SA-1 is a mutation with the hiv-virus and the TB-bacillus and has a 100%
mortaility rate in South Africa.

I am personally aghast at this very rapid spread of this epidemic in SA– this was the
country’s fourth outbreak since 2003. The previous ones all were contained — but this one,
first identified in October 2006 in Pongola, KwaZulu-Natal, has entered the main- stream
population.

The first outbreaks in the Western Cape in 2003 and 2004 of this particular HIV/TB mutant
strain were contained because that particular province’s health department acted with strong
urgency and using the best scientific methods, even tracing down Patient Zero’s contacts all
the way to Zambia and finding others in Zimbabwe…

Due to the rather odd lack of recent publicity about this from the South African health
department itself since April 2007 — I also wonder whether the UK and indeed the European
health authorities are even aware of this very real infection danger of XDR-TB posed for
travellers to and from South Africa?

XDR-TB much more dangerous and infectious than bird-flu… so why this media silence of about
the fact that XDR-TB is now taking on epidemic proportions in South Africa?
Authorities like yourselves cannot rely on the SA health authorities to provide you with the
latest, truthful facts: after all, the SA authorities also failed to report the first two
outbreaks of this particularly virulent XDR-TB strain (SA1 strain) in 2003 and 2004 to the
World Health Organisation and to the Centres for Disease Control – even though it was
contained, it should also have been reported as a completely new strain.
The last official health department SA news release about this epidemic was in April 2007 and
there has been a deafening silence ever since — however my own very excellent medical contacts
in South Africa warn that things are going rather badly out of control now, and that local
clinics and hospitals especially in KwaZulu Natal, but also in the Eastern Cape and Gauteng
provinces, now either follow their own science-ruled guidelines or are trying to make sense of
the rather confusing government guidelines which won’t let them isolate any of the diagnosed
XDR-TB patients if they refuse treatment and also place severe financial constraints on their
use of the correct medicines.

In Europe, are there adequate TB-prevention controls in place at all our ports of entry, for
instance, or are just 10% of the southern-African travellers being ‘checked for TB-infections’
as was still the case a year ago? And are the travellers to South Africa — the World Cup 2010
with its 350,000 soccer fans to that country springs readily to mind — being warned about this
XDR-TB outbreak — and do they now about the fact that even healthy people (not just
hiv-infected people as is being claimed by the SA health authorities) can be infected with this
quite easily by carriers who just have to cough the bacillae into the atmosphere around them?

I know of at least three perfectly healthy people — one a baby and am 18-year-old youth in the
Western Cape who both died at home and; a 41-year old Afrikaner woman who died of XDR-TB at a
private clinic in Klerksdorp, North West province; in other words these three people were
infected by unknown carriers inside their own environment, both were NOT hiv-positive, had
never been treated for TB before and also had no other immune-deficiencies.

None of the available antibiotics had any effect on their condition and they died very quickly,
in fact hospitals in the Eastern Cape are now warning that the second-line drugs being tried on
XDR-TB patients there are having ‘very toxic side-effects".
It’s worrying that TB-Alert is not ringing the alarm bells about this in all the UK news media?

Yours sincerely
Adriana Stuijt
retired medical journalist – ex-Johannesburg Sunday Times

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Obviously, more and more people are now at least
acknowledging that these antenatal clinic surveys
are garbage when it comes to reflecting national
infection rates. Strike one.

Alex

India Has Fewer AIDS Victims Than Thought
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
June 7, 2007

NEW DELHI, June 7 – India, which has repeatedly been accused
of denying the size of its AIDS epidemic, probably has millions fewer
victims than has been widely believed, according to a new household
survey that has not yet been released.

If the results of the survey – conducted under international supervision
with American financing – are correct, India is no longer the world’s
supposed leader, with 5.7 million people infected with the virus in the
official United Nations 2006 estimate; it would again rank behind
South Africa with 5.5 million infected people, and possibly behind
Nigeria with 2.9 million.

Early analysis of the figures in the survey suggests that the number
of infected people in India is between 2 and 3 million, according to
several sources, including American epidemiologists who know
the data and the health ministry here.

"Everyone transiting through here says, ‘This is a pandemic,’ "
Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss, India’s health minister, said in an interview
here. "But I am very confident that we will not turn into a generalized
epidemic."

A nation’s AIDS epidemic is considered "generalized," meaning it
is spreading throughout the sexually active population, when more
than 1 percent of people are infected. India’s official rate has
hovered for years at 0.9 percent of its 1.1 billion people; the new
survey suggests that it may actually be as low as 0.3 percent.

That implies that India has managed to keep its epidemic more
like that of the United States, where the virus circulates mostly
within high-risk groups rather than generally in the population.
In the United States, the prevalance rate is 0.6 percent.

In India’s case, the high-risk groups are prostitutes and their clients,
especially truckers; men who have sex with men; and people who
inject drugs, especially in the northeastern part of the country near
the border with Myanmar.

Some experts on AIDS surveillance techniques have been saying
the same thing for years, arguing that Indians do not have the same
kind of sexual networks that are common in southern and eastern
Africa, in which both men and women often have two or more
occasional but regular sexual partners over long periods of time.
Also, outside of prostitution, "transactional sex" between teen-age
girls and older men in return for money, food or clothes is much
less common in Asia than in Africa.

James Chin, a professor of epidemiology at the University of
California at Berkeley, has argued that the typical way of estimating
AIDS prevalence rates – sampling the blood of pregnant women
who come to urban health clinics and the blood of high-risk groups
– greatly exaggerates national estimates.

[James Chin said the same in an interview with The Boston Globe,
back in 2004, which was roughly repeated in the Washington Post
in 2006. The wheels of AIDS science do turn slowly - Alex]

He has been vindicated by more recent surveys, paid for by the
United States, that take blood samples in randomly chosen
households in rural and urban areas.

One of those, called the National Family Health Survey, produced
India’s new figures.

Such surveys, country by country, have led the United Nations to
gradually reduce its world estimates of the total number of people
infected.

"This is a replay of what happened in Kenya," Daniel Halperin,
an expert on AIDS infection rates at the Harvard School of
Public Health, said of the India report.

When Kenya was more carefully surveyed in 2004, Dr. Halperin
said, estimates of its prevalence rate were more than halved, to
6.7 percent from the 15 percent that the U.N. AIDS agency had
estimated in 2001.

['More carefully surveyed', meaning they used a statistically
sound sampling method, the DHS or Demographic and Health
Survey, performed by the CDC instead of UNAIDS - Alex]

But Dr. Halperin said that AIDS-fighting agencies have such a
stake in portraying the epidemic as an approaching Armageddon
that they are hesitant to make significant downward revisions in
estimates.

[In other words, this is first and foremost a political and
financial disease - Alex]

India’s survey was finished last year, but Avahan, an AIDS group
here financed by the Gates Foundation, refused to discuss the figures
before their formal release, which has not been scheduled.

"If the total number of cases in the world is half of what you’ve
been saying, that’s a bitter pill to swallow," Dr. Halperin said.
"So every year they lower the numbers a little bit, and retroactively
change the estimates of what it used to be. It’s sort of Orwellian."

In Africa, infection rates range as high as 30 percent. South Africa’s
is about 22 percent, and that figure is considered relatively accurate
because the epidemic is older there than in India, and full population
surveys have been conducted.

[Actually, that figure has been shown to be totall bullshit, years
ago. The official infection rate in South Africa is now somwhere
around 11%, which is just a smaller pile of bullshit - Alex]

Claims in recent years by prominent experts that India was in denial
about the scale of its AIDS problem have become a sore point for
Indian health officials.

[The pop-psychology charge of 'you're in denial' fits perfectly
with the lack of scientific rigour that pervades 'AIDS science'
and activism - Alex]

Richard Feacham, until recently the executive director of the Global
Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said in early 2005,
when South Africa was thought to have slightly more cases, that "the
official statistics are wrong – India is in first place." He warned that
India’s epidemic could shoot up to African levels, wiping out the
surging economy and leaving a nation of orphans.

But S.Y. Quaraishi, then head of India’s National AIDS Control
Organization, took offense, calling such projections "technically
incorrect and misleading."

Richard Holbrooke, president of the Global Business Coalition on
HIV/AIDS said in a 2006 interview disparaged contentions by Indian
leaders that their country would not follow Africa’s path, and
compared their political courage unfavorably to that of China’s leaders.

And in 2002, when Bill Gates visited India to donate $100 million
to fighting its epidemic, the country’s health minister at the time,
Satrugan Sinha, accused him of "spreading panic among the general
public" by suggesting that cases could reach 25 million by 2010.

Given the new survey results, Dr. Ramadoss, the current health minister,
was asked if India was owed any apologies. All he wanted, he replied,
was "that the world acknowledge the efforts India is making."

Among them, Dr. Ramadoss said, was the $2 billion it is spending to fight
the disease, the 75,000 people who now receive free antiretroviral
treatment, the 2,000 centers around the country that provide sex
education and condoms to sex workers and clients, and the 3,600
free testing centers.

India sends government workers to hand out condoms outside theaters
showing pornographic films, even though the films are illegal. It has
created a government condom brand called "Dipper," a play on the
the advice painted on the backs of many large trucks, "Use Dipper
at Night," meaning that following drivers should switch to low-beam
headlights.

"India is glaringly not in a denial phase," Dr. Ramadoss said, adding
that he was grateful for the pressure on his country from critics because
it had forced the country to move faster. "We need to work with the
Global Fund, not contradict each other."

Anjali Gopolan, executive director of the Naz Foundation (India) Trust,
which runs an orphanage and fights stigmatization of AIDS victims,
said she was skeptical of any estimate as low as 2 million. But whatever
the correct figure turns out to be, she said, "the infection is here, and
we have a huge burden – we are a very sexually active culture,
contrary to what the politicians want to project."

AIDS is still a disease that carries tremendous stigma in India. In recent
weeks, newspapers have carried reports of an AIDS patient left on the
street outside a hospital to die, of five infected children expelled from
school, and of a woman beaten to death by her in-laws, who feared
she would infect the family.

["AIDS is still a disease that carries tremendous stigma in India." Duh.
A bit like leprosy, really - Alex]

See here the articles from The Boston Globe (2004) and The
Washington Post (2006)

http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/06/20/estimates_on_hiv…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/05/AR200…

Read here Peter Ghys’ feeble defense of the use of antenatal clinic surveys.
He concludes:

"  Donnelly’s article might lead readers to think that AIDS is not as pervasive
as once thought. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The actual number
of people living with HIV globally continues to grow at alarming rates due
to new HIV infections. "

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2…
with_hiv/

I guess not, huh, dr. Ghys?

Alex

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From: john heelan <j…@lorca.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: uk.misc,alt.current-events.net-abuse,alt.journalism
Subject: Re: CENSORHSIP IS IMMORAL, UNJUST AND WRONG
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 95 19:17:30 GMT
Organization: (Private)
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Message-ID: <811711050snz@lorca.demon.co.uk>
References: <DF8DMu.Dqu.0.bloor@torfree.net> <43qpdh$iki@news3.digex.net>
Reply-To: j…@lorca.demon.co.uk
X-NNTP-Posting-Host: lorca.demon.co.uk
X-Newsreader: Demon Internet Simple News v1.29

        You have to admit that Mike is persistent and obviously feels
        deeply that he is being hounded by the "Security Services" and
        there is a Conspiracy out to get him personally.  If that is true,
        then we should be concerned; if he is just paranoid, then we should
        empathise with his sickness.  What we should not do is to invite
        censorship….that just could be implicitly joining in the
        putative Conspiracy.

        Let’s look at Mike’s potential options (and the alleged responses
        he has received):

>        1. Complain to the Police: (their alleged response
>               "Don’t be silly, Sir"; Mike’s rationale "They are part
>               of the Conspiracy")

I don’t think the police as an organisation are part of it. They’re                                
certainly not the source.                                                                          

The officer I spoke to at Easter clearly didn’t know anything about it.                            
And that was at my local police station in London – if anyone in the                                
police knew you would think the people at your local cop shop would.                                

A couple of years ago I had to go into the station after a motoring                                
infraction, the guy I spoke to then said something about "brain like a                              
computer sir" which my suspicions latched on to – (I’m alleged to be a                              
programmer as some people reading this know) – but as per the usual                                
"can’;t prove nuthin" and you ask yourself if you’re just being stupid                              
suspecting on the basis of a straw                                                                  

>        2. Complain to a Member of Parliament (Mike’s rationale: "Can’t
>               because they are part of the Conspiracy")

I could do that actually. But he would probably tell me to go see the                              
police, for which see above.

>        3. Make it visible through the UK Press. (Mike’s rationale:
>               "Can’t because they are part of the Conspiracy")

They are actually. There’s a difference though in the way journalists                              
react to this stuff when they’re "got to" by the security service.                                  

This is completely giving the game away, but the trouble originally                                
started with my reading into stuff that was being written by Times                                  
columnists, in particular our antagonistic friend Mr Levin.                                  
But you see that some journalists are taking part in the conspiracy and                            
others are only doing it because their puppet masters have been feeding                            
them information which they can’t allow themselves to ignore. The                                  
security services have their hooks into the UK media, this case shows                              
that very explicitly. You also see how things get gradualkly wqorse with                            
a particular journalist; a couple of weeks ago Peter Tory in the Express                            
was writing about "nerds seeking their revenge on him through the Net",                            
guess what that was about.                                                                          

>        4. Complain to the UK Security Services. (Mike’s rationale: "Can’t
>               because they ARE the Cnspiracy")

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If the fascist Gestapo bastards plot to                              
see you dead then who’s going to deal with it? Not  the security                                    
services, that’s for sure.                                                                          

>        5. Make it visible through Internet: (Mike has done this
>               suvccessfully; but any gainsayers are "part of the Conspiracy".

I don;t think you’;re part of the consipracy if you refuse to believe or                            
email the postmaster. Those who do know are keeping their silence.                                  

>        6. Complain to the Canadian National and State Governments. (Has
>               Mike done this yet ?)

No. It’s a UK problem so that’s where it should be dealt with. The                                  
perpetrators are UK residents, are unidentified, and would be difficult                            
to deal with through the Canadian courts.                                                          

Ditto the police in Canada, ditto the press – it isn’t their problem,                              
it’s caused by UK people against someone from the UK. Of course Canadian                            
laws are being broken relating to harassment and "stalking" which do not                            
exist in the UK, but the Canadian police do not have a very good record                            
of enforcing those laws anyway.                                                                    

>        7. Complain to the Canadian Security Services (Has Mike done this
>           yet ?)

>        8. Complain to the Canadian Press. (Has Mike done this yet ?)

I think if they didn’t knoiw, they’d just think you were having                                    
delusions; and if they did, then they would side with the people with the                          
power, the smiling English people with their knives out.                                            

Remember, nobody uis going to side with the person who has less power in                            
a copfrontation. The team over here in Canada have the resources of their                          
organization behind them, other broadcasters etc in the UK would have                              
influence with their counterparts in Canada; after all, this was once a                            
British colony, there is still a feeling of "looking up to" the UK among                            
many Canadians, so if a team of security services arrives from the UK                              
with apparently limitless resources to pursue their target,      people                            
over here will forget anything they ever knew about basic human rights                              
and go along with what they are told to do and how they are told to behave.                        

>        9. Complain to non-UK TV Watchdogs (Does Canada have an "Oprah
>           Winfrey ?  Has Mike done this yet ?)

>       10. Complain to the EC Court of Human Rights. (Has Mike done
>           this yet ?)

>                 ……..or…are 6,7,8,9,10 also all part of
>                     the Conspiracy ?

>            –
>            john heelan

1085

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