AEGiS-WSJ: The Rise of the AIDS Dissenters

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2007. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

The Rise of the AIDS Dissenters

Wall Street Journal - March 4, 2007
Robin Moroney

There have always been dissenters from the medical orthodoxy on AIDS, but the Internet and sympathetic politicians in Africa have given them remarkable influence over the past few years. As a result, in parts of Africa "medical authority is no longer revered, and pharmaceutical companies are increasingly portrayed as criminals," writes Michael Specter in The New Yorker (no link available yet). He outlines many overlapping versions of the flourishing "HIV-denial credo."

The first version denies that HIV causes AIDS. This has been most prominently advocated by University of California, Berkeley, professor Peter Duesberg. He has been shunned by the medical establishment for insisting since the 1980s that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS. Rather, he says HIV isn't a killer virus and that AIDS is best avoided by eating properly and abstaining from drugs.

In parts of Africa, Mr. Duesberg's views have amplified politicians' broader suspicions of the motives of Western drug companies. South African President Thabo Mbeki has moderated his support of Mr. Duesberg's views but still rarely talks of AIDS as a medical problem that can be solved by drugs.

As suspicion of Western drug companies grows, so does faith in Africa's traditional remedies. Mr. Mbeki has created a commission on African traditional medicine, whose head, Herbert Vilakazi, routinely criticizes Western science for disdaining African cures. The government backs clinics that supply herbal remedies. Similarly, Gambian President Yahya Jammeh has concocted a herbal remedy he says cures AIDS.

Some Westerners have flourished in Africa amid such suspicions. German physician Matthias Rath has widely distributed large doses of multivitamins as a cure for AIDS across South Africa while denouncing conventional AIDS drugs, with no opposition from the government.

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