The San Francisco Examiner - April 26, 2000
Bruce Mirken

Now, however, South African President Thabo Mbeki appears to be actively flirting with a new form of holocaust denial, one that claims that HIV is harmless, AIDS is a phony epidemic and the only thing endangering the health of Africans is the same set of poverty-related health issues the continent has long faced.

To the chagrin of doctors and scientists in his own country and around the world, Mbeki has tried to turn this into an issue of free speech rather than science.

In a recent letter to President Clinton, he compared the so-called "AIDS dissidents" to Galileo, persecuted by the establishment of his day for believing the earth revolves around the sun.

In an April 16 interview on South African television, he complained that they are being treated like "heretics who should be burned at the stake." But in his hyperbolic defense of free speech, Mbeki lost track of the fact that much of what these AIDS deniers say is clearly nonsense - particularly in regard to their claims about AIDS in Africa.

The HIV-is-harmless crowd's usual line - that it is the use of recreational drugs, AZT and other pharmaceuticals, not HIV, that really causes immune suppression and death - makes no sense in Africa.

So they simply declare AIDS nonexistent.

In an article in the March 14 South Africa Globe and Mail, Charles Geshekter, professor of African history at Cal State Chico and a vocal AIDS denier, makes much of the lack of reliable health statistics in Africa. That's hardly a surprise in a poor continent lacking in health infrastructure and funding, but Geshekter uses it as an excuse to declare all of African AIDS a fraud.

"The scandal," he writes, "is that long-standing ailments that are largely the product of poverty are being blamed on a sexually transmitted virus." There is no epidemic, just a variety of "old sicknesses" that have been "dressed up as HIV/AIDS."

Why have public health authorities perpetrated this fraud? Because "dysentery and malaria do not yield headlines or fatten public-health budgets. Plagues and infectious diseases do."

Such a view denies both common sense and African reality, says Mark Schoofs, who just won a much-deserved Pulitzer Prize for his Village Voice series on AIDS in Africa. Schoofs conducted hundreds of interviews in nine countries over a period of six months, and knows as much about African AIDS as nearly any westerner.

"First of all," he told me recently, "many of the Africans dying of AIDS are middle-class people with jobs - hardly the disease-ridden, emaciated caricature which the AIDS dissidents' conjure up.

"Second, to account for the HIV-induced rise in adult mortality and disease, the dissidents would have to argue that the general status of poor people in, say, South Africa, is actually worse under black rule than it was under apartheid.

This is preposterous on its face, as the ANC has built hundreds of thousands of new homes, provided clean water and electricity to impoverished rural areas and townships, and launched a new primary health care system."

If AIDS in Africa is simply a question of poverty and poor sanitation, the victims should be those whose health is always most vulnerable: the elderly. In fact, Schoofs explained, "The whole burden of disease has changed since the advent of HIV.

Doctors in virtually every East and Southern African hospital I visited said they had witnessed huge increases in young adults coming in with multiple diseases, and/or not recovering from ordinary diseases such as TB."

AIDS in Africa is indeed real. Hopefully Mbeki will see through these latter-day holocaust deniers before they succeed in making an already mind-boggling catastrophe worse.

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Examiner contributor Brumce Mirken is a freelance writer in San Francisco.
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