VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE

AMA ENDORSES GENOCIDE

By Mark Gabrish Conlan

Zenger's August 1996

On June 27, 1996, by a vote of 185 to 181, the delegates to the Chicago convention of the American Medical Association (AMA) endorsed a program of systematic genocide against America's most helpless population-newly born babies-as well as their mothers. Not, of course, that the bare majority that approved of that plan knew that that's what they were doing. What they THOUGHT they were voting on was a proposal to require that all pregnant women take the test for antibodies to the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which has been politically and socially proclaimed-but never scientifically proven-to cause AIDS.

According to the Associated Press dispatch from the AMA convention (San Diego Union-Tribune, June 18, 1996), the members who supported mandatory testing of pregnant women were swayed by a 1994 study report. This study indicated that if adult-strength doses of the "AIDS drug" AZT is given to HIV antibody-positive mothers in the last six to 12 weeks of pregnancy, fed to them intravenously during labor and given to their babies for the first six weeks of their lives, the likelihood that their babies will also test HIV antibody-positive drops from 25 to 8 percent. There's no indication in the AP dispatch that the doctors who voted for this proposal were aware that, according to the same study, the babies born to the mothers who were taking AZT were three times as likely to have birth defects as the babies born to mothers who WEREN'T on the drug.

But that's just one of the problems with the AMA's recommendation-and the other proposals made in recent months for a vast expansion of the reach of HIV antibody testing. Already the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a home testing kit for HIV antibodies, so individuals can test in the privacy of their homes-without even the perfunctory, and often misleading or flat-out incorrect "pre- and post-test counseling" they would receive at a doctor's office or public testing site. And in the euphoria over studies of the latest AIDS drugs announced at the recent international AIDS conference in Vancouver has some doctors to urge that everyone routinely take the HIV antibody test as part of their annual checkup.

The main problem is that what these doctors don't know may kill their patients. As HEAL, Los Angeles research director Christine Johnson points out in her article in this issue ("Mass HIV Testing: A disaster in the making"), when you give ANY sort of diagnostic test to a so-called "low-prevalence population"-a group of people where there are very few cases of the disease for which you are screening-you are going to get many more people testing FALSE-positive than test true-positive.

According to Johnson's statistics (which came from a 1993 CDC study of mandatory testing of blood donations), the prevalence of HIV antibodies in the general population is only ONE IN 17,000 PEOPLE, or 0.006 percent. If we assume that five percent of the U.S. population is in one or more of the risk groups for AIDS-injection drug users, hemophiliacs and "fast-lane" Gay and Bisexual men-the remaining 237,500,000 Americans account for only 14,000 of the 1 million total HIV antibody-positives CDC estimates are present in the U.S. population. If ALL of those 237,500,000 Americans were to take the HIV antibody test, there would be 14,000 true positives-and 223,500 false-positives (.1 percent of the 223,500,000 Americans in low-prevalence groups who are NOT genuine positives). Thus the test would be WRONG 94 percent of the time!

Even if we insist that pregnant women take the test but don't make it a routine practice for everyone else, we are still condemning a large part of our population to FALSE "HIV-positive" status. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about four million babies are born in the U.S. each year. If we use our assumptions, 3,800,000 are not in the AIDS "risk groups" and 2,280 of these are genuinely positive. Testing these women will produce 3,797 false-positives and 2,280 true-positives (plus an estimated 15,776 true-positives from the 200,000 women in the risk groups).

What this means is that 3,797 false-positive women AND 18,056 true-positive women will be given AZT, one of the deadliest and most toxic substances known to man, during their pregnancies-a period in which women are advised to avoid tobacco and most pharmaceutical drugs precisely to AVOID harming their babies! What's more, according to that 1994 study, only 4,514 of the true-positive women will actually give birth to positive babies WITHOUT AZT "treatment."

So in the name of saving 3,009 babies from HIV exposure (the 4,514 minus the 1,505 true-positive women who will give birth to true-positive babies WITH the AZT "treatment"), we will give 21,853 mothers AND children a drug which will stop the reproduction of ALL cells with which it comes into contact, make the babies three times more likely to be born with birth defects, and create side effects that the drug's manufacturer acknowledges are indistinguishable from AIDS itself!

NO responsible doctor would advocate this course of action if s/he were truly aware of the implications. It's an indication of the blinders our supposed "experts" are wearing about AIDS that ANYONE, let alone a majority of the attendees of an AMA convention, ever seriously made this insane proposal. Even if you assume that the 3,009 true-positive babies will all die prematurely of AIDS symptoms, that still leaves almost 19,000 babies each year PHARMACOLOGICALLY MURDERED by the toxic and unnecessary chemotherapies prescribed by their mothers' doctors. The indiscriminate administration of AZT and other DNA cell-chain terminators to anyone who tests HIV antibody-positive needs to be called what it is: MEDICAL GENOCIDE.

Conlan edits and publishes the Zenger's, a monthly gay issues periodical that devotes regular coverage to factual reporting and analysis of HIV, AIDS, and related topics. (Contact: P.O. Box 50171, San Diego, CA, 92165-0171; mgconlan@earthlink.net).

VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE