"I am spiritually close to those who suffer as a result of this terrible illness as well as to their families, in particular those struck by the loss of a close relative," the pope said. "I assure my prayers for all."

Also on Wednesday, a U.N. food agency said that reducing hunger in poor countries was key to fighting AIDS and other infectious diseases.

Hunger and disease create a vicious cycle, as famished people are more likely to fall victim to infectious and chronic diseases, which then reduce their ability to provide food for themselves and their family, the Rome-based World Food Program said in a report.

Malnutrition also makes recovery more difficult even when proper drugs are available, so the international community must take care to couple medical help with food aid, the agency said in its "World Hunger Series" report for 2007.

"Food is often cited by people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS as their greatest and most important need," said Elizabeth Mataka, the U.N.'s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. "Nutrition interventions for HIV programs are often overlooked in the international HIV policy debate and they remain critically underfunded."

DR. PETER DUESBERG and many other scientists say AIDS in Africa is a result, not of HIV, but of the diseases that have always been associated with malnutrition and poor sanitation.

DR. PETER DUESBERG to African AIDS Panel

THE AFRICAN AIDS EPIDEMIC: NEW AND CONTAGIOUS - OR - OLD UNDER A NEW NAME? (excerpt)

June 22, 2000

CONCLUSIONS:

(1) The African AIDS epidemic fails all criteria of a microbial or viral epidemic:

(i) It is steady, i.e. about 75,000 cases per year since the early 1990s, instead of growing exponentially into the large reservoir of 617 million susceptible people, as would be typical of a new viral or microbial epidemic;

(ii) It is not self-limiting via immunity within weeks or months, as is typical of a microbial and particularly of a viral disease. Instead it appears to maintain for years a rather steady share of African morbidity and mortality.

(iii) It is clinically exceedingly heterogeneous totally lacking any specificity of its own, unlike all conventional viral and even bacterial diseases. In conclusion, the African AIDS epidemic does not have even one of the specific characters of a viral or microbial epidemic.

(2) Since the suspected African AIDS epidemic of an average of 75,000 annual cases can neither be identified as a new epidemic

(i) clinically because of its total lack of a clinical identity, nor

(ii) numerically because of its small share of the total African morbidity and because of undetectable effects on the rapid growth of the African population,

the primary scientific task of our AIDS panel will now be to determine whether there is in fact a new epidemic of AIDS defining diseases in Africa, or whether a fraction normal morbidity and mortality has been renamed AIDS. The answer to this question would be the first order of business for all AIDS prevention and treatment programs considered by President Mbeki. To find this answer, I second the proposal from an African AIDS researcher published 13 years ago, "Clinical epidemiology, not [HIV] seroepidemiology, is the answer to Africa's AIDS problem" (Konotey-Ahulu, 1987).

(3) The African statistics of AIDS and HIV antibody-positives confirm Mbeki's suspicion about discrepancies between the African and American AIDS epidemics (Mbeki's letter to U.S. President Clinton, Washington Post, April 19, 2000):

In Africa 23 million HIV-positives generate per year 75,000 AIDS patients, ie. 1 AIDS case per 300 HIV-positives.

But in the US, 0.9 million HIV-positives (WHO, Weekly Epidemiological Record 73, 373-380, 1998) now generate per year about 45,000 AIDS cases (Centers for Disease Control, 1999), ie. 1 AIDS case per 20 HIV-positives.

Thus the AIDS risk of an American HIV-positive is about 15-times higher than that of an African! Since over 150,000 healthy (!) HIV-positive Americans are currently treated with DNA chain-terminating and other anti-HIV drugs (Duesberg & Rasnick, 1998), and since American HIV-positives have a 15-fold higher AIDS risk than African HIV-positives, President Mbeki must be warned about American advice on "treatments" of HIV-positives.

(4) The discrepancies between African AIDS and infectious disease, and the discrepancies between the high AIDS risk of American compared to African HIV-positives can both be readily explained by the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by non-contagious risk factors and that HIV is a harmless passenger virus (Duesberg, 1996; Duesberg & Rasnick, 1998).

According to this hypothesis the African AIDS diseases are generated by their conventional, widespread causes, malnutrition, parasitic infections and poor sanitation as originally proposed by leading AIDS researchers including Fauci, Seligmann et al. (Seligmann et al., 1984).

This hypothesis also offers a simple explanation for the "heterosexual" distribution of AIDS in the African people, a question also asked by Mbeki in his letter to President Clinton (see above). Malnutrition, parasitic infections and poor sanitation do not discriminate between sexes. By contrast, American AIDS would be caused by recreational drugs consumed by millions and anti-HIV drugs prescribed to about 200,000 including 150,000 still healthy HIV-positives (Duesberg & Rasnick, 1998). The non-random, 85%-male epidemiology of American AIDS reflects the male prerogative on hard recreational drugs (heroin, cocaine) and the wide-spread use of drugs as male homosexual stimulants (Haverkos & Dougherty, 1988; Duesberg & Rasnick, 1998).

In the light of this hypothesis the new epidemic of HIV-antibodies would simply reflect a new epidemic of HIV-antibody testing, introduced and inspired by new American biotechnology. This technology was developed during the last 20 years for basic research to detect the equivalents of biological needles in a haystack, but not to "detect" the massive invasions of viruses that are necessary to cause ALL conventional viral diseases (Duesberg, 1992; Duesberg & Schwartz, 1992; Duesberg, 1996; Mullis, 1996; Duesberg & Rasnick, 1998; Mullis, 1998). But this technology is now faithfully but inappropriately used by thousands of AIDS virus researchers and activists to detect latent, ie. biochemically and biologically inactive HIV or even just antibodies against it (Duesberg & Bialy, 1996)! The same technology also provides job security for other virologists and doctors searching for latent, and thus biologically inactive, viruses as their preferred causes of Kaposi's sarcoma, cervical cancer, leukemia, liver cancer, and rare neurological diseases - without ever producing any public health benefits (Duesberg & Schwartz, 1992).

(5) President Mbeki must also be warned about Dr. Joe Sonnabend's answer to the president's question about the epidemiological discrepancy between the "heterosexual" AIDS epidemic in Africa and the non-random, 85%- male epidemic in the U.S. (Mbeki's letter to U.S. President Clinton, Washington Post, April 19, 2000).

According to Sonnabend's hypothesis, Africans acquire HIV heterosexually, because they simultaneously suffer from a long list of diseases, including "tuberculosis, malaria, other protozoal infections, bacterial diarrheal infections, pneumonia, plasmodium, Leishmania" etc. However, the very low AIDS risk of an African HIV-positive, compared to an American, calls this hypothesis into question. If the Sonnabend-hypothesis were correct, African HIV-positives should develop AIDS much more readily than their American counterparts. But the opposite is true. In fact according to Sonnabend most Africans should already have AIDS by the time they pick up HIV "heterosexually".

Moreover, the Sonnabend-hypothesis does not resolve the discrepancy between relatively high share of children from 0-14 years in African AIDS, ie. 7%, compared to the 1% share of AIDS by their American counterparts (WHO, Weekly Epidemiological Record, vol. 49, pp381-384, 4 December 1998). According to the WHO, "AIDS in children is an important phenomenon in many African countries, whereas it is relatively rare in industrialized countries."

Again AIDS in children is not compatible with "heterosexual transmission of HIV" while suffering from Sonnabend's bewildering list of diseases. But AIDS in children is very compatible with malnutrition, parasitic infection and poor sanitation. Therefore, President Mbeki must be warned against treatment of these children with DNA chain-terminators and other anti-HIV drugs as suggested by Sonnabend's hypothesis.

http://www.duesberg.com/subject/africa2.html

Answering AIDS Denialists and AIDS Lies

The Durban declaration states: "The evidence that AIDS is caused by HIV-1 or HIV-2 is clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous, meeting the highest standards of science." And also, "HIV causes AIDS. It is unfortunate that a few vocal people continue to deny the evidence. This position will cost countless lives."

What bona fide AIDS researchers and activists will and will not do when countering AIDS denialists
We will:

Expose the lies and the factual misrepresentations made by the denialists, particularly when these appear in the mainstream media.
Expose individual cases of avoidable illness or death caused by the actions of denialists.
Make supervising authorities or professional organizations aware of conduct by AIDS denialists, particularly scientists, journalists and civil servants, which breaches the normal standards of professional ethics or competence.
Assist investigative journalists in uncovering the financial links between AIDS profiteers and the AIDS denialists who provide mutual support to each other.
Provide factual information on HIV/AIDS to legitimate, mainstream journalists and bona fide members of the public (i.e. not AIDS denialists or agent provocateurs).

We will not:

Engage in any public or private debate with AIDS denialists or respond to requests from journalists who overtly support AIDS denialist causes. The reasons are:

The debate has been settled: HIV causes AIDS, AIDS kills, and AIDS can be treated with significant success by the use of antiretroviral therapy. These are the facts.
The information proving the above is already in the peer-reviewed science literature. The scientific facts are ignored, misunderstood or willfully misrepresented by the AIDS denialists. However, it is not our role to enlighten denialists as to their inability to understand the available information.
Debating denialists dignifies their position in a way that is unjustified by the facts about HIV/AIDS. The appropriate way for dissenting scientists to try to persuade other scientists of their views on any scientific subject is by publishing research in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. For many years now, AIDS denialists have been unsuccessful in persuading credible peer-reviewed journals to accept their views on HIV/AIDS, because of their scientific implausibility and factual inaccuracies. That failure does not entitle those who disagree with the scientific consensus on a life-and-death public health issue to then attempt to confuse the general public by creating the impression that scientific controversy exists when it does not.
Our time is better spent conducting research into HIV/AIDS and/or educating the general public about the facts about this virus and the deadly disease it causes.

This November 2003 Nature article shows why debating denialists is a waste of time.

To help prevent lives from being lost due to ignorance or misunderstanding, we have assembled the content below to address the most common assertions made by AIDS denialists:

HIV, AIDS, and the Distortion of Science – Martin Delaney

Does drug use cause AIDS?

The Consequences of HIV Denialism – Dr. Robert Voigt

Joseph Sonnabend, M.D., makes it clear that denialists are including inappropriate references to him in their literature

AIDS Truth member criticizes AIDS denialists

Several denialist websites proclaim that two—even three—Nobel Prize winners question HIV as the cause of AIDS. Is this true? AIDS Truth investigates.

What our work means: Predictive value of plasma HIV RNA level on rate of CD4 T-cell decline in untreated HIV infection

HIV causes AIDS: An independent review of the evidence

Debunking the Myths of the AIDS Denialists

Response to the Seven Deadly Deceptions

CD4 Counts and Viral Load

Drugs, Disease, Denial

HIV, AIDS, and the Distortion of Science

AIDS denialism: still crazy after all these years - and still killing people in South Africa

Price of Denial by Mark Heywood

Bad Science: Former Denialists Wake Up

Lies, Damned Lies and Dr. Rath

Nature Medicine Editorial: Denying Science

The Curious Case of AIDS Denialist Roberto Giraldo

Echoes of Lysenko: State-sponsored Pseudoscience in South Africa

Correcting the AIDS Lies

HIV denialists ignore large gap in the study they cite

Denying AIDS and the Rwandan Genocide?

Misrepresentation of the Concorde trial perpetuated by AIDS denialists, particularly Anthony Brink

Words of Dr. Harvey Bialy

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