well this is damn interesting.
I want to read more on this topic....thanks

Yes I would also like to read more ! My father died of "AIDS", but it never really made much sense to me. He died 1 1/2 yrs after he was diagnosed with HIV. I thought this was very fast considering the AZT was suppose to help him. He was in Damn near perfect health, biking and running marathons. (very physically fit person )

sorry this is soo long, hope y'all know how to skim-read!
it's from Christine Maggiore, author of "What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong" nad her infomative site, Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives" <christine@aliveandwell.org>

Global Estimates of AIDS Slashed by Millions

Top UK Medical Expert Calls AIDS Epidemic That Never Was

Conservative Radio Star Rush Limbaugh Questions AIDS

President Thabo Mbeki: Still an AIDS Skeptic

Mises Institute Joins AIDS Debate

UNAIDS Admits to a Decade of Exaggerated Numbers

On the eve of World AIDS Day, popular claims about AIDS came under scrutiny once again in the global media. On November 20, the Washington Post revealed that UN AIDS planned to admit it has long overestimated both the size and course of the epidemic, reporting constant increases when evidence showed the opposite was true.A multitude of news stories followed UNAIDS admission of inflated figures, but as Dr. Henry Bauer points out in the commentary following the Post article, media coverage failed to report clearly that the UN AIDS revision was only of statistically calculated estimates, not of the actual situation those numbers pretend to describe.

U.N. to Cut Estimate Of AIDS Epidemic
Population With Virus Overstated by Millions
by Craig Timberg, Washington Post, November 20, 2007

JOHANNESBURG-- The United Nations' top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement.
AIDS remains a devastating public health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an
ever-expanding global epidemic.
The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year's estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV -- estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising -- now will be reported as 33 million.

Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the
epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.
"There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda," said Helen Epstein, author of "The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS." "I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way."
Annemarie Hou, spokeswoman for the U.N. AIDS agency, speaking from Geneva, declined to comment on the grounds that the report had not been released publicly. In documents obtained by The Washington Post, U.N. officials say the revisions stemmed mainly from better measurements rather than fundamental shifts in the epidemic. They also say they are
continually seeking to improve their tracking of AIDS with the latest available tools.

Among the reasons for the overestimate is methodology; U.N. officials traditionally based their national HIV estimates on infection rates among pregnant women receiving prenatal care. As a group, such women were younger, more urban, wealthier and likely to be more sexually active than populations as a whole, according to recent studies.
The United Nations' AIDS agency, known as UNAIDS and led by Belgian scientist Peter Piot since its founding in 1995, has been a major advocate for increasing spending to combat the epidemic. Over the past decade, global spending on AIDS has grown by a factor of 30, reaching as much as $10 billion a year.
But in its role in tracking the spread of the epidemic and recommending strategies to combat it, UNAIDS has drawn criticism in recent years from Epstein and others who have accused it of being politicized and not scientifically rigorous.
For years, UNAIDS reports have portrayed an epidemic that threatened to burst beyond its epicenter in southern Africa to generate widespread illness and death in other countries. In China alone, one report warned, there would be 10 million infections -- up from 1 million in 2002 -- by the end of the decade.
Piot often wrote personal prefaces to those reports warning of the dangers of inaction, saying in 2006 that "the pandemic and its toll are outstripping the worst predictions."
But by then, several years' worth of newer, more accurate studies already offered substantial evidence that the agency's tools for measuring and predicting the course of the epidemic were flawed.
Newer studies commissioned by governments and relying on random, census-style sampling techniques found consistently lower infection rates in dozens of countries. For example, the United Nations has cut its estimate of HIV cases in India by more than half because of a study completed this year. This week's report also includes major cuts to U.N.
estimates for Nigeria, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
The revisions affect not just current numbers but past ones as well. A UNAIDS report from December 2002, for example, put the total number of HIV cases at 42 million. The real number at that time was 30 million, the new report says.
The downward revisions also affect estimated numbers of orphans, AIDS deaths and patients in need of costly antiretroviral drugs -- all major factors in setting funding levels for the world's response to the epidemic.
James Chin, a former World Health Organization AIDS expert who has long been critical of UNAIDS, said that even these revisions may not go far enough. He estimated the number of cases worldwide at 25 million.
"If they're coming out with 33 million, they're getting closer. It's a little high, but it's not outrageous anymore," Chin, author of "The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology With Political Correctness," said from Berkeley, Calif.
The picture of the AIDS epidemic portrayed by the newer studies, and set to be endorsed by U.N. scientists, shows a massive concentration of infections in the southern third of Africa, with nations such as Swaziland and Botswana reporting as many as one in four adults
infected with HIV.
Rates are lower in East Africa and much lower in West Africa. Researchers say that the prevalence of circumcision, which slows the spread of HIV, and regional variations in sexual behavior are the biggest factors determining the severity of the AIDS epidemic in different countries and even within countries.
Beyond Africa, AIDS is more likely to be concentrated among high-risk groups, such as users of injectable drugs, sex workers and gay men. More precise measurements of infection rates should allow for better targeting of prevention measures, researchers say.
Dr. Henry Bauer on Revisions of Imagined AIDS Numbers:How the Media Makes Good News out of Bad Information hivskeptic.wordpress.com/ 29 November 2007
UNAIDS recently decreased by more than 6 million its estimate of the number of HIV-infected people, putting it now at 33 million as opposed to last years estimate of 39 plus million. The estimated number of new HIV cases was also lowered by 40%. (For useful commentary, see Science Guardian of November 20th.)
Media coverage failed to report clearly that the revision was only of statistically calculated estimates, not of the actual situation those numbers pretend to describe.
Thus an editorial on November 25 in the Arizona Republic had the heading, Turning the corner on HIV is inspiration to keep going, and the optimistic comment that The United Nations has revised its HIV estimates downward, correcting statistical flaws that, frankly, should have been addressed earlier. But that shouldnt obscure the good news: a significant drop in new infections in recent years, especially in hard-hit sub-Saharan Africa. Efforts to fight HIV/AIDS have actually turned the corner. Now is the critical time to keep resources flowing, when its clear that prevention and treatment are paying off.
But there had been no good news, just the bad newsfor those who didnt already know itthat UNAIDSs numbers are not worthy of attention, let alone belief.
In this latest revision, for example, the recalculated infection rate in sub-Saharan Africa for 2001 is given as 5.0% (4.6-5.5); in the 2004 version, the rate for 2001 had been given as 7.6% (7.0-8.5). Naove consumers of numbers may imagine that when experts state a range like 7.0-8.5, that asserts with great confidence that the true value lays between
those bounds. Yet three short years later, we are asked to have great confidence in a considerably lower range, 4.6-5.5, that doesnt even overlap the earlier one. That should inspire great confidence in this conclusion: These experts do not know what they are doing.
There is no obvious reason to lend any credence to UNAIDS latest numbers, and sound reason not to. Detailed descriptions of the technicalities of the computer models can make the head spin, but it takes no expertise to recognize that the estimates are an affront to plain
common sense. The ranges of uncertainty attached to UNAIDSs estimates are clearly
nonsensical. Furthermore, UNAIDS estimates for the United States differ greatly from the data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
For whats wrong with many other aspects of officially disseminated HIV/AIDS numbers see my book, The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory which includes nformation on: - The unexplained retroactive reduction by the CDC of actually reported AIDS deaths (page 221) - How the number of HIV-positive Americans has remain unchanged for
two decades during a supposedly spreading epidemic (pp. 1-2) -Poor performance of the computer models used by the CDC, (p. 223) - How the CDC increasingly disseminates estimates rather than actual counts (pp. 221-2)

===

Rush, The Dissident?

Angered by news that UNAIDS had for years misled the global public with exaggerated portrayals of the AIDS problem, the conservative radio talk show host let off some steam and let listeners know where he stands on the issue:
Rush Limbaugh:
From the Washington Post Foreign Service today, a new report to show UN overestimated AIDS epidemic. Now, why would they do that? Why would the UN overestimate the AIDS epidemic? Can anybody say money?
(Reading from the Washington Post) "The United Nations' top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement. AIDS remains a devastating public health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemicThe latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year's estimate,
documents show...Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news..."
However, as is the case with the Drive-By Media, there is always a "however" after the good news. "Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated
the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS."

Oooh, okay, so they did it strategically. They were smart. They lied on purpose to get our attention, to make sure we knew just how rotten it was going to be, and to make sure that governments around the world and individuals threw money at AIDS programs all over the world, administered by the United Nations. Can anybody say, global warming overestimated? Same bunch people.
In fact, this last line, last paragraph, I never thought that I would see this in the Washington Post: "Beyond Africa, AIDS is more likely to be concentrated among high-risk groups, such as users of injectable drugs, sex workers and gay men. More precise measurements of infection rates should allow for better targeting of prevention measures, researchers say."
I don't want to rehash a bunch of history, but I'm sure you all remember back in the eighties when [Ronald Regan] was president and the AIDS epidemic was [supposedly] spreading because Reagan didn't careand if we weren't careful this was going to spread to the heterosexual population in a geometric fashion and it was going to be devastatingThere was never any evidence that it was spreading to the heterosexual community, not sexually anyway, and if you said that, then you were guilty of a hate crime and profiling and discrimination, and all of that.
Now, remember what is fundamentally involved in all this. Science. Science told us it was going to spread, it was going to spread to heterosexual community. Science told us it was going to spread at geometric rates. It was a consensus of scientists. Scientists, scientists,
scientists told us that this was all going to be one of the most devastating things around the world. It was time to cough up money for education and condoms and cucumbers and all that, and we had rock stars like Bono establish philanthropic careers on the basis of all this, all based on science, science, science(www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/da...st.html)

===

The Aids Epidemic That Never Was
Why Political Correctness Influences Too Much Medical Spending
From a UK Guardian report by Karol Sikora, 21st November 2007

Billions of pounds were spent telling us we were ALL at risk from Aids.
But as scientists now admit the threat was overblown, Britain's top cancer expert attacks the political correctness that influences too much medical spending.
At one stage in the early 1990s, the number of people in Aids counselling, helplines and other jobs exceeded the supposed number of sufferers. Moreover, for every three Aids victims there was one Aids organisation. A fortune was wasted on lecturing people who were never at risk.
Medical care should always be geared to the saving and protecting of lives. Compassion in the face of any type of human suffering should be at its core. But sadly, the vicissitudes of political correctness can dictate medical priorities. Certain diseases become fashionable in the public consciousness and so attract more political support and attention.
A classic example of this pattern is HIV/Aids. When this burst on the scene in Britain in the early Eighties, it became the biggest health issue facing the country, over-riding all other medical problems. It monopolised ministerial attention and swallowed huge sums of public
money in campaigns to raise public awareness.
The gay community, which was the most likely to be affected by Aids, was at the forefront of the pressure for vastly increased state funding.

A whiff of panic filled the air, with projections of a soaring rate of mortality from Aids before the end of the century. The Aids terror was extended overseas. It was said that a massive pandemic, on the scale of a modern Black Death, was sweeping through the Third World. Death, in the form of HIV/Aids, was sweeping his cruel scythe through Africa and the Indian sub-continent, extracting an unprecedented toll.
Just as the Aids scare in Britain galvanised the bureaucracy of the state into expensive action, so the international agencies, such as the UN, the World Health Organisation and a host of Third World charities, were gripped by a sense of urgency about the need to tackle Aids.
Yet it has turned out that much of this panic, however understandable, was misplaced.

In Britain, contrary to all the official propaganda of the Eighties that everyone was at risk, it turns out that the disease has largely been confined to certain specific groups: gay men, drug users and migrants.
All those with HIV and Aids, of course, deserve all the medical support that can be given, but the truth is that the overblown panic, based more on politics than science, led to a gross misallocation of resources.
Between the early Eighties and 1993, the Government spent #900 million on advertising, educating about and treating Aids. And the 1987 public awareness campaign - comprising the now famous Tombstone and Iceberg leaflets and adverts, as well as a week of educational TV programmes - cost #20 million.
At one stage in the early Nineties, we had the absurdity that the number of people in Aids counselling, helplines and other jobs exceeded the conceived number of sufferers. Moreover, for every three Aids victims there was one Aids organisation. A fortune was wasted on lecturing people who were never at risk.
Now it turns out that, to an extent, the same is true of the developing world, where the UN has admitted that the scale of Aids has been exaggerated. An official report published yesterday shows that the grim forecasts have been over-blown.
In reality, far from seeing a remorseless rise, Aids has been on the decline for a decade. According to the UN's latest, more honest, analysis, the number of people living with HIV has shrunk from nearly 40 million to 33 million.
Furthermore, new infections have been calculated at 2.5 million, a drop of more than 40 per cent on last year's estimate. In India, the number of Aids sufferers has been revised downwards from six million to three million.
Again, just as in Britain, the idea that everyone is equally at risk has proved to be a fallacy. The UN report admits that, in most parts of the world, the disease is concentrated on gay men, drug users and prostitutes.
This is not to deny that there is still a major problem with Aids, requiring urgent global action. But it does put some of the hysteria in perspective.
What we need in medicine is a sense of realism, not illpolitical posturing, which leads only to warped priorities.
For all the concentration on HIV, by far the biggest killer in the world is dehydration, which is responsible for 12 million deaths a year, mainly in Africa. Simple, cheap improvements in water supplies would seriously cut that number.
Our habit of allowing fashion to influence medical priorities is not new.
The poets Byron and Shelley positively romanticised disease and at the end of the 19th century, there was a narrow concentration on tuberculosis, though a host of other killers bred by poverty in an age without mass affluence or the welfare state were virtually ignored.
Today, we must be realistic about the best way to use health fundsProfessor Karol Sikora is a leading cancer specialist and former chief of the World Health Organisation Cancer Programme.
===

Activists Renew Attacks on South African President After Book Reveals
Hes Still an AIDS Skeptic

Following years of global media reports that President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa had abandoned his skepticism about the HIV hypothesis and was no longer concerned about the toxicity of AIDS drugs, a new book that claims otherwise has treatment activists calling for his dismissal once again.

According to Mark Gressier, author of Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, the president recently admitted he was still an AIDS dissident, and regretted bowing to pressure from cabinet colleagues to withdraw from the debate.

As reported in Business Day Johannesburg, past news stories claiming that Mbeki had had a change of heart on the issue after a meeting in 2002 with former US President Bill Clinton were apparently incorrect. Instead, Mbeki was just capitulating to [political] pressure when he stopped using his position as president to promote open dialogue on HIV and
AIDS.
The news that Mbeki remains an "AIDS dissident" has been widely published in the international media. The BBC, Guardian and New York Times have all run the story. So far, Clinton has made no public comment on the matter.

Steven Friedman, senior research associate at the Institute for a Democratic SA, said he was not surprised by the revelation: "Mbekis opponents know he is an AIDS denialist and his supporters don't care." In fact, following the first round of controversy over his questioning stance on AIDS in 2000, Mbeki was re-elected in 2004 with a resounding 73% of the popular vote.

Anyone taking a look at the latest population studies from South Africa would have to wonder exactly who is in denial about what: According to figures released last month by Stats South Africa, in the past ten years, the population of the country has grown 20% - from 40 million to 48 million!

(Sources: Business Day Johannesburg, November 12, 2007,
allafrica.com/stories/200711120640.html

===

Research Institute Enters AIDS Debate

An article introducing questions about HIV and AIDS to academics recently appeared at the web site of the Mises Institute, a research and educational center of political theory and economics. Working in the intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the Mises Institute, seeks to restore a high place for
theory in economics and the social sciences, encourage a revival of critical historical research, and draw attention to neglected traditions in Western philosophy.

AIDS and HIV: Rethinking the Conventional Wisdom by Brad Edmonds,
www.mises.org/story/2080

The conventional wisdom is that the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, is the direct and only cause of AIDS. Recently, however, a few brave researchers are calling the proposed relationship between the virus and the disease into question. Among the findings are that there are many people who have the virus who don't have the disease, and vice versa;
that in recent years many people diagnosed with the virus die from the side effects of the medications commonly prescribed; indeed that scientists never have determined how HIV might cause AIDS.
Worse, AIDS itself hasn't been clearly defined by anyone, and the Centers for Disease Control have changed their own definition periodically. Diagnostic tests, then, and necessarily, are notoriously inconclusive and differently interpreted from one lab to another (even more so from one country to another). Lives are being ruined needlessly on the basis
of tests that don't even directly detect a virus that itself might do nothing.
Aside from challenging conventional wisdom, these studies I've noted have in common that they cover health-related topics so important that following the wrong advice could have strong deleterious effects on one's health. Remember that dietary advice, when incorrect, hurts mainly those who are most conscientious those most likely to obey doctors' (incorrect) orders.

The popular media are headlining these recent findings because, in 2006, reporters and editors find the results surprising. This shouldn't be the situation: In some cases, scientists have been finding the same things for many years; in other cases (such as with regard to AIDS and HIV), the received wisdom is based on only a few weak studies, widely
distributed and hailed as The Truth immediately upon their original release, never to be questioned thereafter.
Reliance on objectively measured, reproducible, empirical evidence; the application of sound reasoning to that evidence; and open, worldwide peer and public review of studies all contribute to the health of a field that already enjoys the advantage that every new scientist enters his career having studied the best that generations before him have
already discovered.

Why, then, do scientists appear so often to be so wrong about such important and sometimes ostensibly simple relationships between behavior and health? For one thing, scientists haven't been very wrong very often: Selective reporting by the mainstream media has created ignorance among the populace about what the scientific findings actually have
been.
The more important problem is that the government holds most of the purse strings making scientific discovery possible. The AIDS arena demonstrates how damaging government interference is: Once a given hypothesis has been accepted as Received Wisdom by the government, researchers with alternative hypotheses not only find it difficult to get funding for their research, they can find themselves unable even to find a job and
teach classes; they can be blackballed by the other professors in their field who don't challenge the received wisdom. Sometimes, these other professors work in different specialties, and aren't even fully qualified to comment on whether a blackballed professor's ideas have merit.
The problem with science serving the public interest is not that there's anything wrong with the method used in the natural sciences. Nor, indeed, is there a problem in the fact that many scientists (such as the ones who blackball original thinkers) have strong biases of their own, causing them to use their own power to limit the range of hypotheses that receive funding. After all, there are very many scientists and very many universities. A free marketplace of ideas eventually, and inevitably, weeds out those who prefer pet hypotheses to free inquiry.
No, the real problem is centralized government funding of research, which always results in selective funding by people often ill-equipped to decide which studies should be funded and which shouldn't. In a free market, where the government doesn't crowd out private investments in research, private funding makes it possible to explore nearly any
hypothesis, from the ingenious to the crackpot (for which the ingenious ones are often mistaken in our politically-charged marketplace today). We already see private initiatives at work here and here; imagine what the possibilities would be without government involvement in the market.

Science, like anything else, is just a tool; like anything else, it can be wielded for the good or for the bad. It requires a market in ideas to keep the process discovery moving in the right direction toward truth. As Murray Rothbard wrote more than half a century ago, science
"is solely the job of the free market economy. Any government meddling with this job can only distort and disrupt the economy, injure the efficient workings and development of science and technology, and substitute unwanted coercion for individual freedom." Getting government out of the funding business is the only way to discover what amazing
contributions medical science in particular, and scientific inquiry in general, can make to our quality of life.

Brad Edmonds is the author of There's a Government in Your Soup, writes
from Alabama.

===

STD Cases Reach All Time High in 2006 While HIV Estimates Remain Stable
for 10 Years

Yet another reason to question popular claims about HIV and AIDS: While official estimates of the number of Americans thought to be HIV positive has remained unchanged since 1996, the actual number of cases of sexually transmitted diseases in the country rose again, with 1 million new cases of Chlamydia reported for 2006 alone. Compare that number to the highest cumulative estimate of HIV cases in the US at 1.5 million since the beginning of the so-called epidemic, and it becomes clear that something doesnt add up!

Chlamydia, Gonorrhea and Syphilis infections Up in 2006
Yahoo News November 13, 2007

Chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis infections rose again in the United States in 2006, the second year in a row that rates of these sexually transmitted bacterial infections increased.

The rate of chlamydia increased by 5.6 percent between 2005 and 2006, with more than 1 million reported chlamydia cases in 2006 -- the highest number of annual U.S. cases ever for any sexually transmitted disease. According to the CDC, the reported cases of hlamydia are likely less than half the actual occurrence.
The rate of gonorrhea rose 5.5 percent in 2006, with more than 350,000 cases reported, and the rate of syphilis rose 13.8 percent, with nearly 10,000 cases.

About 19 million new sexually transmitted infections occur each year in the U.S., almost half among people ages 15 to 24. This is a hidden epidemic, said Dr. Stuart Berman, who helps track STDs for the CDC.
According to Dr. John Douglas, who heads CDC STD prevention efforts, local and state health departments lack the funds necessary for prevention programs, and lack of health care insurance among many Americans might be a contributing factor as well.