VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE
GARRETT INTERVIEWS GESHEKTER
And vice versa
Rethinking AIDS Dec. 2000
On March 21, Laurie Garrett of Newsday interviewed African History professor Charles Geshekter. Garrett is one of the world’s most influential AIDS reporters; Geshekter is an outspoken critic of press reports that describe an African epidemic of sexually transmitted “AIDS.” Garrett’s dispatches from around the world run as wire reports printed in daily newspapers across the United States. She is a formally trained immunologist (with a masters degree), and author of a best-selling, science-based novel, The Coming Plague, which prophesied a doomsday infectious epidemic even worse than what AIDS is said to be.
With unrivaled access to the most powerful captains of the AIDS industry -- top government officials, pharmaceutical executives, university department chairs, celebrity advocates -- Garrett’s writing heavily influences world opinion about HIV and AIDS. Geshekter, a faculty member at California State University at Chico, and other AIDS “dissidents” regard Garrett’s writing as an example of all that’s wrong with typical press AIDS coverage. She uncritically promotes the HIV-causes-AIDS concept without ever having doubted it. Meanwhile she ignores critics of this view, except to ridicule and misrepresent them on the rare occasion when they manage to get themselves heard despite the media blackout that Garrett herself helps to impose.
Garrett requested the following interview after Geshekter’s appointment to the AIDS advisory panel of South African President Thabo Mbeki (RA June and July), just as Mbeki prepared to host the “Super Bowl” International AIDS Conference in the South African coastal resort city of Durban. Mbeki had come to respect those who attribute “AIDS” to non-HIV factors, including Geshekter. This compelled a very reluctant corporate press corps to cover a matter its members, including Garrett, prefer to ignore.
Along with her colleagues, Garrett produced a gush of high profile press dispatches that essentially amounted to press releases for the powerful people who promote the notion of a sexually transmitted epidemic of “AIDS,” and who think that those who question it should be silenced.
For this reason, at the onset of his phone interview with Garrett, Geshekter asked if he could record it. She agreed. In the course of their interview, Geshekter managed to ask Garrett questions, and she answered.
Two main points of contention emerged during their mutual interview. The first involved press accounts of an apocalyptic “AIDS” epidemic in Africa, with Geshekter pointing out that such reports never offer reliable, confirmable figures, or any compelling reason why African cases of “AIDS” should be thought of as resulting from a sexually transmitted microbe rather than the typical factors of poverty that have always caused the “AIDS” diseases in Africa. Like other adherents of the HIV model of AIDS, Garrett regards any increase in “AIDS” diseases as evidence in favor of HIV as the explanation. But she did not dispute Geshekter’s critique of the unsubstantiated epidemiological figures, and agreed many areas of the continent have suffered from an increase in poverty, the main factor that HIV critics believe best explains “AIDS” diseases in Africa. Her only defense of the HIV explanation came in her observation that some regions had enjoyed sharp economic improvement, though interestingly she did not claim an increase in “AIDS” diseases for those areas.
Their second major dispute involved sex. Geshekter pointed out that AIDS in Africa predominates among blacks rather than whites, whereas he has observed the greatest and most widespread poverty among the blacks, and the greatest promiscuity among the whites. Garrett did not dispute this characterization. Instead she focused on Geshekter’s broaching of a recent medical report examining “HIV-positive” rates among current and former black African female prostitutes. The report showed a lower-than-average rate for current sex workers, and an average rate for retired ones. The authors dutifully interpreted this as a characteristic of “HIV tests” as indicating infection with a sexually transmitted microbe, and so did Garrett. In this case Geshekter held back and let Garrett construct an increasingly elaborate, absurd, and amusing apologia for this bizarre interpretation
The interview follows.
GARRET: From your firsthand experience, how would you summarize what you’ve gleaned in terms of the whole causality question and whether or not there’s an AIDS epidemic.
GESHEKTER: You’re aware, Laurie, that an AIDS diagnosis in Johannesburg is a different diagnosis than you would make in Jacksonville, right? You know AIDS is defined differently in Africa than it is in the United States?
GARRET: Right.
GESHEKTER: Okay. So knowing that there is a different definition of AIDS in Africa because it’s based on clinical symptoms, along with tuberculosis since about 1993, I wanted to see the sort of environmental and living conditions in rural South Africa that could be contributing to the causation of those clinical symptoms: a fever, a cough, loose stools, 10% loss of body weight in a couple of months, and the crowded conditions in African townships that would contribute to the development of tuberculosis.
I wanted to see those things for myself. I knew that 61% to 64% of Africans in South Africa, which is around 22 or 24 million, live in conditions of poverty. I know the per capita GNP of Africans in South Africa is 1/10 that of Europeans, about $600 per year versus $6,000. I wanted to see if there weren’t some non-HIV insults that could be making people sick. That was the point of my going and talking to people themselves in local areas. You read my recent piece in the Globe and Mail (March14, 2000). They chopped a lot out, but I tried to include conversations I had with people in villages as to what they thought was going on.
GARRETT: Is there an AIDS epidemic?
GESHEKTER: Well, if you define AIDS as …
GARRETT: Let me restate it. Is there an HIV epidemic?
GESHEKTER: That I don’t know either. You know that there’s only one real study, an annual antenatal survey that’s done in South Africa? It’s done at antenatal clinics.
GARRETT: Yes.
GESHEKTER: All right. The latest one I have is February 1999. I’ve got a summary report. They did a single ELISA test and you know there’s a high degree of unreliability and error when you do a single ELISA test on a pregnant woman, right. Isn’t that established?
GARRETT: Yes.
GESHEKTER: It is established. They perform a single ELISA test on about 15,000 or 18,000 pregnant African women, not white women, not Asian women, and not “Cape Coloured” women. Just African women. They do a single ELISA test, which as you know in pregnancy, can cause cross reactivity and unreliability in the result. From that, they make projections and extrapolations about HIV prevalence in the entire country of 42 million people.
Now there’s something wrong with that. That’s very fishy. So when you ask is there an HIV epidemic, I go back to the best study done by the Department of Health and think it’s problematic. There are lots of questions and flaws about that test. I’m saying we’ve got to look at the methodology used to come to the conclusion that there is an HIV epidemic. Here’s the actual title: Summary Report, February 1999, Department of Health, Health Systems Research in Epidemiology 1998 National HIV Seroprevalence Survey of Women Attending Public Antenatal Clinics in South Africa. That’s the best document I have. If something came out in February 2000, I haven’t seen it. But this was the document I have to work with.
GARRETT: Right.
GESHEKTER: There’s this problematic definition, Laurie, of an AIDS case in Africa which overlaps with so many other illnesses and maladies. Isn’t that pretty well understood at this point?
GARRETT: Sure. But is there a higher mortality rate now in Africa?
GESHEKTER: We’ve got 650 million people in Africa. If you ask me if there is a higher mortality rate in South Africa or if you ask me if there is a higher mortality rate in Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa, then I would say that’s a better question.
GARRETT: Okay. Let’s narrow it down then. Let’s say Kwazulu-Natal.
GESHEKTER: That’s something I tried to find out. I was told that the data didn’t exist. I was curious about that question because I know that vital statistics are better in South Africa than any other country on the continent. I wanted to know if there were good baseline statistics on mortality and morbidity in, say South Africa in 1975, broken down by different provinces. They’ve since realigned the country but we could do this. Were there good numbers for 1975 that I could compare to 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, so that as a historian looking over the questions of death or sickness I could see something over a 20 year period? Maybe those numbers exist. I haven’t been able to locate them. But I would say that everything I know about Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and certainly Somalia, strongly suggests that over the last 20 years, we need to look closely at the deteriorating state of public health facilities, rising inequities in food distribution, rampant inflation rates, unemployment figures and the flight of professional African doctors and public health people from the continent, to understand why people probably are sicker and may be dying in greater numbers these days. That would be my hunch over the last 20 or 25 years. I could say that with a certain confidence about Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania because the evidence is there about the decline in immunization rates for measles, and the increasing rate of mortality in childbirth. I think that’s caused primarily by the breakdown of state structures and political economies. I’m not even getting into the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs. I think things have gotten worse on the continent in the last 20 years. I could tell you that with great facility about Somalia, which is a country I know well and watched fall apart in the last 30 years.
GARRETT: Well, I doubt anyone would disagree with you on that.
GESHEKTER: I know you’ve been to Africa a lot. Does that square with what you’ve seen as you traveled to the continent in the last several years? When was the first time you went to Africa?
GARRETT: 1979.
GESHEKTER: Okay, so you’ve got 20 years of experience. What did you see over the last 20 years?
GARRETT: Much of what you say rings true. Although it’s much more varied than, I think, what you’re saying. There are some countries, some pockets of some countries where improvements really have been made.
GESHEKTER: Okay.
GARRETT: Certainly levels of corruption vary radically around the continent and going to some place like Zaire, where one never finds a paid health care worker anywhere except perhaps a missionary worker. And all the supplies have been looted and, you know, Mobutu did a great job of bankrupting the whole damn country and civil wars since have been no real blessing. But there are places where I have seen things get better.
GESHEKTER: I agree with you. I’ve seen things get better in northern Somaliland for example, this little de facto independent republic that said “to hell with Mogadishu” in May 1991, when the whole system collapsed in Mogadishu. The Somalilanders, the people in the north that used to be a British Protectorate, said: “We’re going to be the independent Republic of Somaliland.” It’s an impoverished, rickety structure but the level of security, the level of honesty and of a willingness to work hard to try to resuscitate civil institutions in the north of Somalia are much better than anything I’ve seen in southern Somalia. I don’t disagree with you. I’m just giving you a specific breakdown inside one country.
GARRETT: I would also say that I’ve seen an epidemic.
GESHEKTER: You’ve seen an epidemic of what?
GARRETT: I’ve seen an epidemic of AIDS.
GESHEKTER: But what is AIDS then in Africa? How do you define it?
GARRETT: Well, you tell me, you’re the one who is advising President Thabo Mbeki, not me. I’m just a journalist.
GESHEKTER: I don’t know that I’m advising President Mbeki. I’m only responding to a series of important and troubling questions that President Mbeki’s office raised. As a scholar, I am trying to rely on the best available evidence from the refereed bio-medical literature to answer those questions. I’m not suggesting that there is only one answer. But I think that when it comes to discussions about AIDS or HIV in Africa there has been an astonishing lack of diversity of opinions or viewpoints about the meaning of the facts or the theories about the facts, in terms of what you and I see and what’s causing it. I suspect that you and I are seeing exactly the same thing. If we compared our notebooks, where we went and what we saw, we could probably agree on what we were looking at in terms of the facts. I think we disagree on our theoretical or scientific understanding of what’s caused those sorts of things. I think what President Mbeki wants to do is try and reconcile what seems to be irreconcilable. That’s why I strongly support what he’s doing, in the interest of getting to the bottom of all this, and trying to figure out what’s making Africans sick, how we know it and what can be done to restore them to full health. All the rest is problematic as far as I’m concerned. Those are the two key questions. I don’t know how to say it any better than that.
GARRETT: So, are you an adherent of Peter Duesberg’s theory?
GESHEKTER: Duesberg is a widely published scholar. He’s written in Cancer Research and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in Pharmacology and Therapeutics and the Journal of Tumor Marker Oncology. He’s a retrovirologist and one the country’s top cancer researchers. He’s very prolific. Which particular theory of Duesberg’s, because I didn’t know that he wrote a lot about Africa?
GARRETT: HIV is harmless.
GESHEKTER: He says HIV is a passenger virus.
GARRETT: Yes.
GESHEKTER: He says HIV is a retrovirus and by definition a retro-virus does not have any cell killing mechanisms to it.
GARRETT: Right.
GESHEKTER: Isn’t that his argument?
GARRETT: Well, basically in a larger scale he says that all retro-viruses are incapable of producing pathological disease.
GESHEKTER: Right. I’ve read that people actually tried to find the articles or the refereed research studies back in the beginning, in 1983 or 1984, that actually showed this and could be reproduced. That’s the crucial thing here about science, it’s got to be reproducible. Did studies actually show that there was a causal link between the presence of antibodies to HIV and the onset of the clinical symptoms that define a disease, as opposed to these surrogate markers, the CD4 cell counts, T cell counts, viral load and so forth? I don’t think that study has ever been published. I’ve looked for it myself. Have you ever seen a study that’s absolutely shown...?
GARRETT: I don’t know what “absolutely” means because when you start to get to the level of how people say a word like “absolutely” then, like how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin? I’ve had this discussion endlessly with Duesberg. In my book, The Coming Plague, you know that I have cited many references, along those lines. I have 150 pages of bibliographic citations in that book, the bulk of them relate to AIDS and go through all those early studies. I also note in the book that the studies in the 1980s, particularly the first round of antibody tests were seriously flawed and the claims about Africa were seriously flawed but were all retracted, they were all countermanded and much better tests and much better data was produced subsequently. Many of the initial surveys going in and claiming enormous infection rates in 1983, 1984, 1985 in Africa subsequently turned out to be bogus.
GESHEKTER: Did you come to the retrovirus conference in San Francisco in February, 1999?
GARRETT: Yeah.
GESHEKTER: Wasn’t there a study there that talked about prostitutes in Nairobi? I think it was by Francis Plummer or some group from Manitoba with people in East Africa. You’ll know this better than I, but the prostitutes who had been actively involved in unprotected sex for a long time remained HIV antibody negative. This was extremely interesting to the researchers to explain what was going on. Then I think the prostitutes stopped doing their sex work, stopped the prostitution for a number of months but when they went back again, there was an increase in the HIV antibody positivity tests, which was very confounding. There was a Sarah Rowland-Jones who said at this conference, that it seemed to suggest that in order to maintain immunity against HIV you had to have continual exposure to HIV. What’s going on here? How can that be? I’m bewildered by this sort of thing.
GARRETT: Well, that’s true with many viruses.
GESHEKTER: It seemed to suggest that the prostitutes needed to continue to have unprotected sex in order to remain protected?
GARRETT: With polio, you have to have antibodies to maintain polio immunity.
GESHEKTER: How do you sort this out? You’re a researcher.
GARRETT: That’s basic immunology 101. It’s true with most antigens.
GESHEKTER: So why are we telling everyone to practice safe sex if exposure to HIV provides immunity to it?
GARRETT: I can guarantee you that you’re no longer immune to smallpox because your body is no longer seeing smallpox. Whatever margin of immunity you got 15-20 years ago from a vaccine has long since worn off. You no longer are producing memory T cells that respond to that specific antigen stimulation. You will have to have a whole new antigen presenting cell exposure at some later date if you ever want to be able to withstand smallpox again. Fortunately, that’s probably not going to be an issue. But that’s perfectly normal with viruses.
This is why, for example, influenza immunity wears off very quickly and rarely provides cross immunity from strange strains. In the case of polio you need to have polio in your body to maintain polio immunity and that’s another reason why you need to be re-vaccinated constantly and why there’s been a substantial decline in net immunity when we switched from injectible to oral vaccine, because oral actually does a scorched earth policy. It kills off the virus in the gut and as a result, you’re less likely to have sustained exposure to polio virus over time and therefore maintain high immunity than you do when you take the injectible form, where you continue to make polio viruses in your gut for the rest of your life and you make immunity in your bloodstream and the two are present constantly and you maintain a very high level of immunity to polio. But if the virus weren’t there, you wouldn’t have immunity.
The fact that this is seen with HIV is typical to all known major viruses, as far as I know. You cannot maintain a herpes virus immunity when herpes goes into latency and your immune system no longer sees it, as far as I know. I was trained as an immunologist. I admit I haven’t worked in the lab for awhile, but I do keep track of basic literature and attend all the major immunology meetings and as far as I know, this is absolutely immunology 101, basic, rudimentary first year course.
[Editor’s Note: In order for Garrett’s explanation here to prevail in preserving the claim that “HIV tests” indicate infection with an AIDS-causing, sexually transmitted virus, we must now accept yet another special plea on its behalf. Unlike all other microbes accepted as sexually transmitted, the one allegedly indicated by the “HIV tests” transmits as an inverse function of exposure frequency! In other words, the more frequently you expose yourself to people who harbor an infection, the smaller your likelihood of acquiring an infection. See the September issue of RA for a detailed discussion of this medical report and the perspective of it that Garrett represents here.]
GESHEKTER: But how do you explain the differences? How do you put together an explanation that makes sense of the alleged differences between sexual behavior or sexuality in New York versus Nairobi? What’s the difference between sex in Africa and sex in North America that would lead to the presentation of those clinical symptoms that define an AIDS case in Africa? I’m trying to shift away from the molecular biology to the clinical case definition of AIDS in Africa. That’s something I find troubling as an African historian. The explanation given for AIDS cases in Africa is premised on the transmission of HIV and also on the notion that there’s something that Africans do in terms of some so-called “African sexual culture.” I’ve seen that term used a lot, so how do you handle this? You live in New York, you’ve been to Africa. What’s the difference? What am I missing here?
GARRETT: Well, that’s a many, many hours discussion as I’m sure you’re quite aware. You’re asking me questions. I called to ask you questions.
GESHEKTER: Okay, fair enough, but both of us must deal with brevity. You’ve got to write on deadline, I try to write for a popular audience. We obviously have as our motto “dare to omit.” You leave out a lot, I leave out a lot. But this is a key...
GARRETT: Are you saying that you think there aren’t any differences between male/female gender relations, power relations, and sexual activity in North America versus Africa? You think they are identical?
GESHEKTER: I didn’t say they were identical. Hear me well here. I am fully prepared to investigate sexuality and sexual behavior between different age groups, ethnicities, and social classes. I think it would be easy to point out a range of differences in terms of gender relations, the way sex is negotiated, the role of sex in life itself across gender lines, race lines, age lines and socio-economic class lines in North America. That’s what the Sex in America survey (1994) made crystal clear. I’ve never seen such a survey in Africa. I certainly haven’t seen one for South Africa. I’m not aware of any one in Somalia. I know a lot about sexuality in Somalia because that’s one culture where they do the most radical form of female circumcision. Infibulation is where they remove the clitoris and the labia minora and stitch the labia majora shut. If we want to talk about sexuality and Somali culture, I know something about that. I’m trying to figure out what we mean when we talk about “Zulu sexual culture.” What about “white sexual culture” in South Africa?
If you want a contrast between various kinds of interest in sex, the contrast would be between blacks (rural, impoverished, preoccupied with other kinds of activity) versus leisured, wealthy middle and upper class whites in the suburbs of Johannesburg or at the beaches around Durban. If I were to talk about a sexualized culture, it would not be about the blacks in South Africa; it would be about the whites. But there doesn’t seem to be much HIV or AIDS cases in that culture. That’s why I wonder what’s sex got to do with AIDS exactly? I’m curious. I’m at California State University in Chico. In January 1987, Playboy, admittedly not one of the great scientific magazines in the country, said that Chico State was the number one party school in America. We’ve got 15,000 students here at CSU, Chico. My students tell me that on any given weekend, to use the local euphemism, “there’s a lot of pipe getting laid” in Chico, California. So where’s the HIV? Where are the AIDS cases? Does this retrovirus know zip codes? How can that be? There is a tremendous amount of condomless sex that seems to be going on around here. But there’s no HIV and there’s no AIDS. Why is that? That’s a very important question that we’ve got to come to grips with. I would certainly ask the same question about Gauteng province around Johannesburg, or about Eastern Cape or Kwazulu-Natal. What I find so troubling are these notions about black people, poverty and sex. There’s a racist set of assumptions profoundly embedded in those claims. President Mbeki has seen that and he’s asking questions. I say, good. He should be asking.
I’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand things about Africa and explain them back to African audiences in a way that makes sense to them. It’s not my culture, it’s not my history. I’m an outsider. I’m a professional stranger. But because I’m a professional stranger, I’m not given to the pieties that are so sacred in any culture. The outsider is an important person to ask these kinds of questions. I made a documentary about Somalia for PBS in 1984 (broadcast in 1985) with WQED in Pittsburgh, called the “Parching Winds of Somalia.” I also write about Somali humor, political economy, poetry, and historical resistance to colonialism.
GARRETT: Well, Charles, why is there such a question of whether or not there is a bona fide AIDS epidemic in Africa? Why is it so important to you personally?
GESHEKTER: It’s important to me personally because my training is as a scholar concerned about the numbers and statistics of any social phenomenon on the African continent. It is gigantic numbers, which are often rounded off to talk about the number of AIDS orphans or the number of deaths from AIDS in Africa. When I see those kinds of numbers, Laurie, personally and professionally I lean forward and say, ‘show me those numbers; put your statistics on the table.” That’s how we do it in my field. You can’t just make up numbers from nowhere. When I ask for a good breakdown of numbers, I get blank stares. That concerns me to my core. It’s quoted in my latest piece in the Globe and Mail. I asked Allen Whiteside, who’s read my work and doesn’t evidently disagree with it, at least in his correspondence with me. Meeting him at his office at the University of Natal, I said, this was in December, 1999, “Allen, it was reported in the South African press on World AIDS Day by Mark Heywood, from the AIDS Law Project at the University of Witwatersrand, that there were 100,000 AIDS deaths in South Africa since last World AIDS Day. 100,000. This is shocking, troubling, and terrifying to hear this number. I accept this number as true for the moment. Can you break that down for me?” He’s an economist and a demographer and I was asking Whiteside as an economic historian, “Can you break that number down in terms of province? How many people are we talking about from north Transvaal, KZN, Eastern Cape, Gauteng or Western Cape? Can you break it down by province? By age? By gender and by race? I would like to see fine cuts of these 100,000 AIDS deaths. Not 80,000, not 120,000, a hundred thousand.”
He laughed at me and said,“We don’t have those numbers.” I said, “but how can someone say this to scare the readers of a country?” It scared me. That’s when he pointed to the antenatal survey. Now that does not fly. When somebody uses those kinds of numbers and cannot back them up, something is fishy. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it. That’s why I’m concerned. I see people in rural Africa who are petrified and frightened to death of going to a clinic because they’ve got a cough or a fever, or they’ve got a kid with diarrhea. They are afraid of going because they fear that some nurse, medical missionary, or doctor may look at them and say, “I think you may have AIDS and now we’re going to do a single ELISA test.” People commit suicide when they think about that. Wouldn’t that disturb you too?
GARRETT: Uh huh.
GESHEKTER: Seriously, Laurie, come on, wouldn’t this bother the hell out of you when I tell you these kinds of things?
GARRETT: I’ve reported such things widely.
GESHEKTER: Well, that’s what bothers me. That’s what’s troubling me about AIDS. How do we define it and what are we actually counting? I’m mystified and annoyed to see the shrieking, screaming, ranting and raving and psychologizing about a serious international leader, Thabo Mbeki, who follows in the footsteps of one of the moral icons of the 20th century [Nelson Mandela]. The vilification and ad hominem attacks on him from so-called ”AIDS activists” in South Africa. That surely must give someone reason to pause and wonder what the hell is going on. Why is everybody so afraid? You didn’t ask me if I had spoken to the minister of health?
GARRETT: Not yet. It’s reported that you did.
GESHEKTER: I did indeed.
GARRETT: And what was your impression?
GESHEKTER: I had a 90 minute meeting in December, 1999, at the Ministry of Health with Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. She evidently heard that I was going to make a presentation at MEDUNSA, the National Medical University of Southern Africa which is outside of Pretoria. I was invited to make a presentation there to doctors and medical students and suddenly got an invitation to come to have a meeting with the Minister. I met with the Minister and can tell you that Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is a thoroughly professional, calm, knowledgeable, well informed bureaucrat.
She’s a member of the cabinet, a member of parliament. She asked me basic questions. I tried to give basic answers. Anything I said I tried to back up with references or documentation. I wasn’t able on such short notice to bring a library full of material but I did my best. We talked about the pharmaceutical issue about AZT and Glaxo-Wellcome. We talked about this “African sexual culture” business, the definition of an AIDS case, difficulties with the ELISA test, the way the Western Blot gets read differently depending on which lab on which continent and which technician is doing the reading. I was impressed by her. She was a model of professionalism, care, scrutiny and calm in the face of this gathering storm.
One of the things I liked about Manto was that she was the former Deputy Minister of Justice. She had a reputation that when advisors would present her with complicated, convoluted pieces of legislation or new laws for South Africa, she would read them over and if they were loaded with legalistic jargon that was impenetrable and not understandable, she would tell the staff, “I want this rewritten in a way that the people will understand it. I want the people of the country to understand these laws and regulations.”
I think she’s trying to apply that same liberating, open kind of philosophy to questions of public health. She doesn’t want technical jargon. We all rely on technical jargon. You just gave me a display of it 15 minutes ago, and I can do the same thing in terms of African history or its unique arcana. But Manto doesn’t want that for ordinary people in the streets of Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Cape Town, Stellenbosch or wherever. She wants these pressing issues about health, wellness, and the effectiveness of drugs to be expressed in a way that ordinary people can understand and feel safe and secure in that knowledge.
I don’t see what is objectionable to that. That’s why I fully support her efforts and Mbeki’s as well. They are going in the right direction. It’s astonishing to me that anyone would want to crucify them over this. Unless, they’ve got something to hide, the crucifiers I mean.
GARRETT: Such as?
GESHEKTER: Such as maybe everything we’ve been hearing about the infectious viral cause of those clinical symptoms of AIDS has been incorrect. What are those people going to do? Are they going to say, ”We got it all wrong?” They can’t say that. They are going to have to say, “it’s far more complicated than we originally believed.” There’s a phrase that often appears when I see new research. It’s all over the map and convoluted. You know this latest study about feeding micronutrients to HIV positive pregnant women in Dar-es-Salaam, which was reported a couple of years ago in Lancet. The reaction to that was always that the study raised more questions than provided answers.
I think some people in South Africa are beginning to notice a self perpetuating momentum to the orthodox view about HIV and AIDS. And I think Mbeki is asking those who are defenders of the orthodoxy, to belly up to the bar like big boys and girls, and discuss these things openly, with self-confidence in public. We will battle over these issues and when we finish our battling, you know what Laurie? We’re all going to go together and have a proper meal at a Durban Indian restaurant, have cold beers and talk about how scientists can debate and differ with one another with the only goal in mind: to get at the truth, contingent as it may be, and open to change. But we’re not going to resort this kind of 16th or 17th century business of excommunication, crucifiction and banishing of people because they hold different ideas. Scientists don’t do that anymore, at least they say they don’t.
VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE