E-drug: Origins of AIDS and inappropriate use of injections
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Below are two newspaper items on a recent article in the International
Journal of STD and AIDS. It is on the origins of AIDS and the role of
unclean needles and poor sanitary circumstances. I understand that
there is a lot of controversy about it, but if this information is true, we
will need to work much harder on changing injection practices in the
world. And not just on improving sterilization practices and ensuring
that needles are used only once, which is unlikely to happen anyway.
We will need to convince providers and consumers that injectable
preparations should be used in a very limited proportion of medications
only. This may be a hard battle and require much intervention
research.
I wonder what E-druggers think of this news.
Hilbrand Haak
Consultants for Health and Development
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Sleedoorntuin 7 tel: +31-71-523.2052
2317 MV Leiden fax: +31-71-523.3592
The Netherlands haakh@chd-consultants.nl
Visit CHD's website at www.chd-consultants.nl
[Copied as fair use]
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Study challenges African AIDS beliefs
By OLIVER MOORE
Globe and Mail Update
Thursday, Feb. 20, 2003
The "AIDS industry" is allowing Africans to die unecessarily because it
will not accept that unsafe sex causes far fewer infections than
unclean medical practices, argues a Pennsylvania anthropologist
whose research could revolutionize AIDS prevention strategies.
"There's a lot of people that are getting HIV in Africa because no
one's told them the truth about where it's coming from, that's the
thing that's really scary," Dr. David Gisselquist told globeandmail.com
Thursday.
Published in The International Journal of STD and AIDS, the new
research runs sharply contrary to 15 years of assumptions about the
pandemic, which has infected almost 30 million people in sub-Saharan
Africa. Conventional wisdom since the late 1980s has blamed
heterosexual intercourse for between 80 and 99 per cent of AIDS
transmission in Africa, a number that Dr. Gisselquist says has been
wildly inflated.
He argues that the current orthodoxy is based on Western
misconceptions about African sexuality, unproved assumptions and
scientific research too often led "more [by] public relations savvy than
evidence."
Dr. Gisselquist's research team compiled data from hundreds of
studies, with the results showing that as few as one-quarter of AIDS
cases are caused by heterosexual sex. More than half of all
transmission was found to have been caused by unsafe medical
procedures, primarily the use of dirty needles.
The United Nations agency fighting AIDS in Africa � which has almost
70 per cent of the world's infections � has been working for years
with the premise that unsafe sex is the main transmission route for the
disease. UNAIDS believes that as few as 5 per cent of AIDS cases
stem from dirty needles.
On Thursday, UNAIDS spokespeople cast doubt on the Gisselquist
study's findings.
"We're concerned that a report like this might tend to make people
drop their guard and not use condoms, when it's exactly using
condoms that is required at this point," the agency's chief scientific
advisor, Catherine Hankins, told the BBC.
Dr. Gisselquist acknowledges that his team's findings go strongly
against current orthodoxy and require "a willing suspension of
disbelief."
"The leadership of the international AIDS industry has taken a very
negative attitude to the issue, and once you raise it they dump on it,"
he said in a telephone interview. "But we lay it out in detail. ... If
somebody doesn't like our number, that's fine, this is a matter of
science, it's not a matter of what you like and what you don't like."
The group is firm in its belief that a new approach to AIDS prevention
must be taken. "At issue in a re-evaluation of the heterosexual
hypothesis are the profound implications for our interventive approach,
and for the kinds of social and financial commitments that must be
made," they write in the journal.
"The first thing is to tell the truth," Dr. Gisselquist told
globeandmail.com. "There's been a lot of bad science, and people
have been following this and haven't been examining it."
The World Health Organization and UNAIDS have invited Dr.
Gisselquist to a meeting next month to discuss his findings.
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New Study Questions How AIDS Spreads in Africa
VOA News
20 Feb 2003, 15:16 UTC
International scientists report in a new study AIDS in Africa may not
be spread largely through sexual contact but, rather, by unsafe medical
injections.
The findings, published by the International Journal of STD and AIDS,
contradict widely held views on the spread of the HIV virus in Africa.
A team of eight experts from three countries estimate only about one
third of adult cases of HIV infection are sexually transmitted. They say
contaminated needles cause more HIV infections than unsafe sex.
But the United Nations AIDS research center - U.N. AIDS - strongly
disputes the report. It says only about five percent of new HIV
infections in Africa are caused by dirty needles.
The new report cites as evidence studies identifying babies in Africa
who are HIV positive, but whose mothers are not. The researchers say
this suggests the babies were infected by unsafe needles. They also
say the AIDS pandemic in Africa has not followed the normal pattern
of sexually transmitted diseases or STD's. The researches say during
the 1990s in Zimbabwe, cases of STDs decreased while HIV infections
rose, suggesting the virus was not transmitted by sexual contact.
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