What Causes AIDS?

HIV & AIDS - What Causes AIDS?: "While HIV infection remains steady at this modest level in the United States, World Health Organization officials claim that the same virus is spreading rapidly in Africa and Asia, creating a vast 'pandemic' that threatens to infect at least 40 million people by the year 2000, unless billions of dollars are provided for prevention to the organizations sounding the alarm. These worldwide figures, especially from Africa, are used to maintain the thesis that 'everyone is at risk' in the United States. Instead of telling Americans that AIDS cases here are almost 90-percent male, authorities say that worldwide the majority of AIDS sufferers are female. With the predictions of a mass epidemic in America and Europe failing so dramatically, AIDS organizations rely on the African figures to vindicate their theory.

But these African figures are extremely soft, based almost entirely on 'clinical diagnoses,' without even inaccurate HIV testing. What this means in practice is that Africans who die of diseases that have long been common there---especially wasting disease accompanied by diarrhea-are now classified as AIDS victims. Statistics on 'African AIDS' are thus extremely manipulable, and witnesses are emerging who say that the epidemic is greatly exaggerated, if it exists at all.

In October 1993, the Sunday Times of London reported on interviews with Philippe and Evelyne Krynen, heads of a 230-employee medical relief organization in the Kagera province of Tanzania. The Krynens had first reported on African AIDS in 1989 and at that time were convinced that Kagera in particular was in the grip of a vast epidemic. Subsequent years of medical work in Kagera have changed their minds. They have learned that what they had thought were 'AIDS orphans' were merely children left with relatives by parents who had moved away and that HIV-positive and HIV-negative villagers suffer from the same diseases and respond equally well to treatment. Philippe Krynen's verdict: "There is no AIDS. It is something that has been invented. There are no epidemiological grounds for it; it doesn't exist for us."

Krynen's remark calls attention to the fact that AIDS is not a disease. Rather, it is a syndrome defined by the presence of any of 30 separate and previously known diseases, accompanied by the actual or suspected presence of HIV. The definition has changed over time and is different for Africa (where HIV testing is rare) than for Europe and North America. The official CDC definition of AIDS in the United States was enormously broadened for 1993 in order to distribute more federal AIDS money to sick people, especially women with cervical cancer. As a direct result, AIDS cases more than doubled in 1993. Absent the HIV mystique, there would be no reason to believe that a single factor is causing cervical cancer in women, Kaposi's sarcoma in gay males, and slim disease in Africans. "