Editors' note: UPDATE:
Drug companies, backed by the World Bank and Rockefeller money, are
preparing a publicity onslaught to target Africans as human guinea
pigs in a hugely profitable and malicious scam at the 7th
international "AIDS in Africa" conference during the week of
December 8-15th. Read the background information below and find out
more about the conference in DISS/cuss,
the Ways forum for Dissonance. News Flash and activist
alert for Dec. 8, 1997.
For the full story of the specious claim that AIDS originated in
Africa, see Richard and Rosalind Chirimuuta's book,
AIDS, Africa and Racism. For the
global economic context of AIDS testing in Africa, see "Horton
Hears the W.H.O." in DISSONANCE.
From the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in the
early 1980's, western scientists have attributed its origin to black
people, first in Haiti and then in Africa, yet the scientific literature
that claims to prove an African origin is full of inconsistencies and
sheer racist nonsense.
If human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) — or some other as yet
unidentified micro-organism — is the cause of AIDS, there are a
limited number of possibilities as to its origin: a human population
that has harbored the virus for many years and from whom the virus has
spread in recent years; an animal reservoir of the virus; or a mutation
of an existing human or animal virus. The first possibility, a human
reservoir for HIV, the "isolated tribe" or "village
disease", was presented in detailed form in 1984, (1)
but this hypothesis entirely disregards the historical record. For many
centuries before the Portuguese sailed around the Cape, powerful west
African kingdoms conducted trade across the Sahara to the Mediterranean,
and every year many thousands of west Africans made the pilgrimage to
Mecca. (2, 3) On the east African
seaboard, city-states flourished on trade between central and southern
African kingdoms such as Monamatapa in Zimbabwe, and Asia as far as Ming
dynasty China. (4) With the advent
of the Portuguese four hundred years of the African slave trade began.
Millions of Africans were transported to the New World and Europe.
African women were regularly raped from the time of capture. (5)
Following the demise of the slave trade came the scramble for Africa,
when almost the entire continent was colonised by the European powers.
If AIDS was the cause of a tumour as common as Kaposi's sarcoma in
equatorial Africa, the disease would have spread to the rest of the
world hundreds if not thousands of years earlier.
Reading the scientific literature about a simian (monkey) origin for
the human immunodeficiency virus can be a confusing business. It is easy
to gain the impression that simian retroviruses can readily infect
humans, but evidence for this is minimal. The simian immunodeficiency
viruses (SIVs) that have been isolated from monkeys are, like all other
retroviruses, species specific: in nature no monkey retrovirus normally
infects a human or indeed a different species of monkey, and there is no
monkey reservoir for HIV. (6) Only
chimpanzees have been reported to be successfully infected with HIV, but
they do not become ill. (7) A simian
origin for HIV thus requires two chance events, a mutation of a monkey
virus into a virus that could infect a human, and blood-to-blood contact
between the monkey with the mutant virus and a human. Even in human
populations, AIDS is not very efficiently transmitted via limited
blood-to-blood contact, much less so than Hepatitis B, as evidenced by
the minimal risk of becoming seropositive from needle stick injuries
between medical personnel and patients. (8)
AIDS researchers have claimed that Africans inject themselves with
monkey blood or give their children dead monkeys as toys. (9,
10) Africans have rejected these claims as preposterous.
(11) Even for the minority of
Africans who hunt and eat monkeys, the prospects for human infection
with even a mutant strain of SIV would be remote.
The improbability of transmitting a mutant retrovirus from monkeys to
humans has not stopped AIDS scientists from making wild speculations.
Claims that SIV was similar to a virus isolated from west African
prostitutes were disproved when the SIV was found to be a laboratory
contaminant. (12, 13, 14, 15)
Undeterred, scientists have estimated that SIV mutated into HIV in the
last few decades, their conclusions based on estimates of the rate of
mutation of these viruses and their degree of genetic dissimilarity.
(16) Even if such an improbable
event did occur, given the existing colonial ties and trading links
between Africa and Europe, the virus would have caused an epidemic in
Europe at the same time as — or before — the epidemic in the
United States. Yet all the documented evidence points to an epidemic
beginning in America and from there spreading to Europe. (17,
18)
Three other arguments have been presented in support of an African
AIDS hypothesis that are in fact peripheral to the origin of HIV. First,
a number of cases of AIDS-like illnesses have been reported in Africans
or people who have been to Africa that predated the AIDS epidemic in
America. (19, 20) These can only be
considered evidence for an African origin for AIDS if they were genuine
cases of AIDS, and if such cases only occurred in Africa. In reality
sporadic AIDS-like cases have been reported in the medical literature
for many years but, with few exceptions, only those with an African
connection have been highlighted. (21, 22, 23)
Two of these cases were investigated further and were found to be
spurious. The Danish surgeon who worked in Zaire and died in 1977 has
been given a great deal of attention in medical and popular literature,
but a sample of her blood that had been preserved was found to be HIV
negative, although this has only been mentioned in private
correspondence and not in the medical literature. (24)
The other, a Manchester seaman who sailed to many continents including
Africa and died in 1959 has been regarded as the first documented case
of HIV infection. Samples of his tissue were preserved and were reported
as containing HIV, but when further tests were carried out in a
different laboratory the original findings were disputed. (25)
Second, much of the evidence for an African origin for HIV comes from
blood tests that are unreliable [see the Dissonance piece "Horton
hears the W.H.O." for the global politics of AIDS testing in
Africa]. No blood test is perfect, and all tests give some percentage of
false positive and negative results. Reports of HIV-positive tests in
African blood taken decades before the AIDS epidemic in America and
Europe are particularly suspect because of the age of the samples and
possibilities for contamination. (26)
In patients who have more than average amounts of circulating antibodies
in response to other infections, the chances of a false positive are
higher. This is undoubtedly the case for people continually exposed to
malarial infection and other parasitic and infectious diseases. (27)
Evidence dating back to the mid- 1980s shows that false positivity was a
major problem in both stored serum samples and in samples taken during
population studies for HIV in Africa, but it has largely been ignored.
(28, 29) Claims that new tests can
now be trusted are also untenable. Research published in 1994 found that
antibodies to Mycobacterium antigens (antibodies produced by patients
with tuberculosis and leprosy) give a positive test for HIV. (30)
Third, the sheer scale of the AIDS epidemic in Africa has been used as
an argument for African origins. In this scenario, AIDS must have been
in Africa longer than elsewhere for it to have affected so many people.
On the grounds that the health services of most African countries cannot
afford the diagnostic tests for AIDS, the World Health Organization has
different criteria for defining AIDS in Africa, based on signs and
symptoms only, from AIDS in the rest of the world [see "Horton
hears the W.H.O." for more details, in particular, "The
Human Cost" for the effects mis-diagnosis]. (31)
This case definition includes patients who have prolonged cough, fever
and weight loss, the classic presenting symptoms and signs of
tuberculosis and other diseases common in the tropics. Both clinical
criteria and diagnostic tests that fail to distinguish between HIV and
treatable diseases common in Africa are used, separately or together, to
estimate the extent of the HIV epidemic in Africa.
There are other reasons to dispute the scale of the African AIDS
epidemic. In the West,
progression from HIV infection to AIDS is reported to be from 5 to 7%
annually. (32) This ratio is a
function of the rate of progression from infection to manifest disease.
If the huge number of reported seropositive Africans are seropositive
for the same reasons as their counterparts in the West, then they should
be developing AIDS and dying at a comparable rate and the continent
should be witnessing a death rate far in excess of that which is
occurring. Seropositive Africans do have a higher death rate than
non-seropositive Africans, but this would be the case even if the
majority of the seropositives were false positives suffering from
chronic malaria, tuberculosis or other diseases. (33)
A further difficulty with the African epidemic is the equal or near
equal sex incidence of seropositivity found in population studies. It is
claimed that this is due to the heterosexual transmission of HIV in
Africa. (34, 35) Studies in the West
have shown repeatedly that HIV positivity is far more likely to be
transmitted from semen donor to semen recipient (whether the latter is
male or female) than the reverse, and there is no reason why this should
be different in Africa. (36, 37) If
heterosexual intercourse is the major means of transmission of HIV in
Africa, HIV seropositivity and AIDS should disproportionately affect
women. An equal sex ratio implies not sexual transmission but the
converse, non-sexual transmission, and one obvious explanation would be
that the large majority of seropositives in Africa are false positives
due to malaria, tuberculosis and other infections that affect men and
women equally.
If the evidence for an African origin is contradictory or
insubstantial, are there any credible alternatives? One possibility that
has been given scant attention in the vast scientific literature about
HIV and AIDS is an artificial origin of a mutant virus. This would seem
rather surprising, as the risks of mutant viruses emerging from
laboratories has been widely debated for many years. In the early 1970's
several molecular biologists also expressed concern at the risks of
molecular biology, and published a book Biohazards in Biological
Research. (38) In February 1975,
at Asilomar in California, an international conference of molecular
biologists agreed a policy of self-regulation that included "appropriate
safeguards, principally biological and physical barriers adequate to
contain the newly created organisms, [should be] employed", and "certain
experiments . . . ought not to be done with presently
available containment facilities." In the following years the
debate entered the body politic, and by 1976 the National Institutes of
Health released guidelines for research on recombinant DNA molecules,
and the following year the Federal Interagency Committee on Recombinant
DNA Research issued an interim report on Suggested Elements for
Legislation that was subsequently enacted by the US government. (39)
It was virtually impossible for any molecular biologist researching
AIDS in the early 1980's to have been unaware of the debate about the
risks of molecular biology and the subsequent legislation regulating
their activities. Even before the AIDS epidemic, retroviruses were the
subject of intense research activity because of their ability to turn
RNA into DNA, and their possible role in causing cancer. Hundreds of
thousands of African green monkeys and other species have been exported
from Africa to research laboratories in Europe and America, where they
have been subjected to experimental infections and their tissues used in
cell culture. If HIV is a mutant monkey virus, it is surely more
probable that it came from a laboratory than from monkey with naturally
mutated virus biting man somewhere in "darkest Africa." That
the latter hypothesis and not the former has been pursued suggests that
factors other than science have been guiding the activities of AIDS
researchers.
Within the scientific literature about AIDS and Africa all the racist
themes can be found underpinning arguments for which scientific evidence
is contradictory or absent:
- Africans are primitive peoples living in isolated tribes cut off
from civilization, so they could have harbored diseases for centuries
before they spread to the rest of the world.
- They are evolutionarily closer to monkeys, thus could more readily
acquire monkey diseases, perhaps by having sexual relations with
monkeys or at least involving them in their sexual practices.
- They are sexuality unrestrained, and a sexually transmitted disease
would therefore spread more rapidly amongst them than any other
people.
- Their intelligence is limited and they cannot understand the
complexity of a disease such as AIDS, and their objections to being
attributed with its source are harmful to themselves and do not need
to be taken seriously.
AIDS science has at its heart a small number of assumptions and at
first glance it may seem difficult to understand why there is so little
debate or even diversity of opinion among the many scientists
participating in this complex research activity. Part of the explanation
for this lies with normal scientific practice. Each field of science, or
at least mature science, has a core of theories, described by Lakotas as
the 'hard core' of research programs, (40)
or, in a somewhat different conceptual framework, by Kuhn as paradigms.
(41) Scientists working in the field
are unlikely to challenge the existing paradigm, in part because of
training and discipline, which can constitute a form of internal
censorship, and in part from external peer pressure. The latter can be
of a very practical nature, as scientific careers can only progress if
funds can be obtained for research projects and the results of research
are published in learned journals. Leading scientists in the field
normally have influence over both the allocation of funds within their
field of research, and, by the process of peer review and editorial
control, publication in scientific journals.
Yet even 'normal' science does not function independently of its
social, economic and political context. The days of the independent
scientist conducting experiments in the study at home are long gone, and
the political and economic priorities of government and industry now
largely determine the allocation of funds. And, as scientists bring
their own particular cultural baggage into their work , so too the
results of their work are expected to conform with the prevailing
cultural norms or vested interests. The manner in which science in the
late twentieth century is organized and funded makes it possible for a
small group of scientists very well connected to the political, military
and industrial establishments to dominate their area of research, and in
so doing, promote the interests of their sponsors even at the expense of
scientific truth.
