"You Bet Your Life"

How AIDS in Africa was Overstated.

No, that's not me pontificating, that's the Washington Post!.

This is a critical article, so grab a seat and pay attention.

Cecil Rhodes -- Englishman of colonial fame once said:

We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.

This succint statement explains centuries of tragic colonial rule of Africa -- thousands of folks enslaved, oppressed and exploited -- for the glory of the empire.

Well, colonialism ended in the 70's -- a good thing. But, has something almost as sinister replaced the old regime? Here comes the new boss -- same as the old boss.

Post colonialism, a lotta smart pharmaceutical executives would still love to sell "surplus AZT goods" to the natives. And, a lotta European and American politicians would like to accrue political capital by facilliating this massive "aid" to these misbegotten folks. So, a convergence of interests emerges -- those African folks have to be sick -- so we can save them with our western medicines! (and make $$ in the process).

That's why the big push, the graphic photos, the preening, the preaching, the moralizing about Africa. We need those folks to be sick with AIDS -- to justify the massive "help" we wanna give. Didn't you know that 98% of these folks are infected with deadly viruses, transmitted by freaky sexual practices and will die tomorrow if we don't act now!? Please accept our AZT and Nevirapine. Clean water, nutritious food and political stability  --be damned!

So, that's how it began. The horror stories of Africa, the eminent threat of massive infection. Death, doom, destruction -- unless we act! At every opportunity, exaggerate the threat, accentuate the misery, demand "treatment"

Of course, the Post doesn't quite get this big picture -- but they do provide a critical piece of the scaremongering puzzle -- the systemic exaggeration of data:

KIGALI, Rwanda -- Researchers said nearly two decades ago that this tiny country was part of an AIDS Belt stretching across the midsection of Africa, a place so infected with a new, incurable disease that, in the hardest-hit places, one in three working-age adults were already doomed to die of it.

Yup. That was the narrative. Doom and death from a pesky little virus.

But AIDS deaths on the predicted scale never arrived here, government health officials say. A new national study illustrates why: The rate of HIV infection among Rwandans ages 15 to 49 is 3 percent, according to the study, enough to qualify as a major health problem but not nearly the national catastrophe once predicted.

Darn, the national catastrophe never came to pass. Rwanda may have a lotta problems -- hideous civil war to name one. Lack of good food and clean water, to name two. But, blaming her problems on a mysterious chimpanzee virus, unseen and undetected for centuries until the late 1980s (via Greenwich Village and Castro), well, sorry, we didn't buy it then, and we don't buy it now.

The new data suggest the rate never reached the 30 percent estimated by some early researchers, nor the nearly 13 percent given by the United Nations in 1998.

What a surprise.

Taken together, they raise questions about monitoring by the U.N. AIDS agency, which for years overestimated the extent of HIV/AIDS in East and West Africa and, by a smaller margin, in southern Africa, according to independent researchers and U.N. officials.

We need a lot more independent researchers to sift thru this mess. Garbage in, garbage out.

"What we had before, we cannot trust it," said Agnes Binagwaho, a senior Rwandan health official.

God Bless Ms. Binagwaho! She's got more common sense in her little finger, than the collective IQ of those idiots running the UN or WHO!

Years of HIV overestimates, researchers say, flowed from the long-held assumption that the extent of infection among pregnant women who attended prenatal clinics provided a rough proxy for the rate among all working-age adults in a country. Working age was usually defined as 15 to 49. These rates also were among the only nationwide data available for many years, especially in Africa, where health tracking was generally rudimentary.

Billions of dollars spent on "overestimates" and "assumptions"?!!? Could the AIDS bunglers be any more incompetent than they already are?

New rule: If you hear some horror stories about African AIDS, take it with a large grain of salt. Talk to some folks who have been there. Dr. Bialy used to live and work in NIgeria. Call him. Likewise Dr. Geshekter and Dr. Rasnick. These professionals have lived, worked, thrived, published and integrated themselves into African life at various times in their professional careers. They have the answers and the insights -- not these idiots at WHO or these inane journalist-stenographers in the mainstream press (notwithstanding my new favorite paper, the Washington Post)

Bottom line: Africa has many problems -- mostly derived from the residual effects of exploitative colonial rule. But, HIV ain't one of them. Clean water, good food -- and leave 'em alone. That would be the best medicine.

The Money or the Honey?

Newsweek -- an otherwise clueless, inane political weekly -- asks a good question: Are drug studies biased?

Earlier this month, two major medical journals admitted that in recently published studies they had failed to disclose the authors’ financial ties to the drug and device makers. In one case, the journal Neuropsychopharmacology published a favorable review about an implant device, approved in 2005, that treats depression by administering electric pulses to the brain. The authors were either consultants to or employees of the device maker, Cyberonics Inc.  For the third time in two months, editors at the Journal of the American Medical Association learned belatedly that the authors of a published study—this one examining the link between migraines and heart attacks in women—had financial ties to the companies with a stake in their findings.

Um, dirty little secret, boys and girls. Shh. Don't tell -- don't wanna sully the pristine fingers of these ramrod righteous scientists. Psst. Drug companies often sponsor the studies of their own drugs. Too much $$ at stake to risk adverse results. Must. get. approval. from. FDA.

Oh, you thought science was the independent pursuit of truth?

Heck, Who do you think paid for the first "double-blind placebo" study of AZT? Well, of course, it was Burroughs Wellcome, the maker of AZT!

Ah, Hank, there you go again, always harping on the negative, always badmouthing our honorable scientists -- like a Luddite, always ignoring all the good that western medicine and technology has done for the world.

Not so! I just don't see why folks need to be ingesting all these toxic chemicals, fueled by money, when you mighta wanna go for the simple stuff, fueled by honey

Multi-headed Vaccine Idiocy

No, I'm not opposed to vaccines.  Had my shots as a kid, didn't seem that bad or controversial, no side-effects, good health for 4 decades. Once, though, in the service, I had to get a vaccine for Yellow Fever -- knocked me on my ass for 48 hours!

I've also read some of the autism-thimersol controversy -- don't have strong opinions, although I am totally sympathetic to parents of autistic kids seeking answers. But, that stated, there's some serious monkey bizness on the vaccine front.

First, we have the "obesity vaccine." Is this shot gonna stop me from craving a cheeseburger at the neighborhood bar-b-que? Somehow ..... I doubt it. Boondoggle writ large.

Then, we have the miraculous bird flu vaccine. Wow! That's gonna be a big seller --- seein' as SOOOOOOOO many people in the states have come down with bird-brain bird flu. A whopping total of ZERO have died in our country from bird flu. So, the vaccination is gonna reduce this number to.......what? Also, there's always a few folks who react badly to a vaccine and get the actual disease -- so we may get more deaths from the vaccine (a handful) then the virus itself. Boondoggle writ large!

Last, we have the famous cervical cancer vaccine. Big, big sheckels for Merck. Gotta make up for them lost profits from all those Vioxx lawsuits.

Now, I don't wanna seem impertinent, here, but where and when did these geniuses demonstrate that Human Papiloma Virus causes cervical cancer?  The first cancer-causing virus in humans was discovered in 1980 by none other than Roberto "Scientific Misconduct" Gallo. So, I reckon sometime in the past 26 years, some fellow made the link between HPV and Cervical Cancer.

Who was he, and where is the work published?

If ya ask me, there's a lotta high-tech, snake-oil salesmen running corporate medicine these days, but we're always willing to be edified.

Drugs Errors Hurt 1.5 Million Patients Per Year

No, that's not me pontificating -- that's Associated Press

Perhaps the most stunning finding of the report was that, on average, a hospitalized patient is subject to at least one medication error per day, despite intense efforts to improve hospital care in the six years since the institute began focusing attention on medical mistakes of all kinds.

Say it ain't so, Shlomo!

The new probe couldn't say how many victims of drug errors die. A 1999 estimate put the number of deaths, conservatively, at 7,000 a year. Also unknown is how many of the injuries are serious.

Cough...Lazarou Paper.. cough... Hey, Genius, it's at least 106, 000 deaths/year. But, these ain't drug errors -- these are from correct doseages.

"The numbers are big. The injuries are big. This is a problem, it's serious and it continues," said report co-author Michael Cohen, president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices

Dr. Cohen -- a PhD in the obvious.

For now, Bootman advises consumers to be aggressive in questioning doctors, nurses and pharmacists about their medications, whether they're watching over a hospitalized loved one or figuring out their own pills at home.

Aggressive questioning of doctors? I like that!