AIDS in Nigeria (The Book)

I was given a copy of AIDS in Nigeria; A Nation on the Threshold (Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, 2006) some time ago by a student friend who happened to have been employed with others in the editing and design of this large, expensively produced anthology of twenty-four commissioned HIV/AIDS/antiretroviral drug articles. The book was funded by the Gates Foundation and includes many beautifully reproduced color photographs of dying children.

The Preface announces the book’s purpose as: to help guide the HIV response for Nigeria, a nation of 130 (now 140) million, at a “threshold” that may see “52 million living with HIV.”

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has been the most serious natural disaster to hit the world in recent centuries. In the worst affected regions, notably sub-Saharan Africa, this steadily progressing catastrophe threatens to become a calamity of cataclysmic proportions. [Hence, “stakeholders” need this book], a single, authoritative source on HIV/AIDS in Nigeria. [Foreword]

I read through the book in part because it lacks an index but mainly because it was my first exposure to a large colorful coffee-table book on a health topic. Here is a fair summary of the book’s main emphasis:

1. “Although data suggests that Nigeria’s nationwide prevalence has not dramatically increased since 1999” and currently only “one million Nigerians would be considered eligible to receive antiretroviral therapy,” yet “the need remains great to scale these activities up significantly.”
2. Public health efforts in Nigeria “should be primarily directed against HIV/AIDS.” This is because “HIV/AIDS will diminish any positive effects that might have occurred as a result of other improvements in life standards and health care,” because the epidemic has impacted not only the health sector but the economic and development sectors, and for other reasons by similar [remarkably illogical] logic.”

Some chapters are surveys of how the Nigerian health professions and international health organizations have responded to the AIDS epidemic (advances in monitoring, the role of civil society organizations, behavior change programs under George Bush’s PEPFAR initiative). Two other chapters are on epidemic virology and molecular epidemiology. In the main, the argument is to scale up HIV/AIDS industry activities in Nigeria even at the cost of overall public health.

There are two or three brief statements—quoted from health workers low in the health hierarchy—on the harm to Nigerian public health caused by drawing people from the limited pool of trained people into AIDS/HIV/antiretroviral projects because of the Foundation-supported salary opportunities and on the social cost of diverting funds and attention from much-needed rural health (clean water, disease prevention, out-back clinics, pre-natal care, etc.) toward urban, high-technology, Western-dependent directions. However reasonable these few statements, the lead contributors (Nigerian doctors, PhD’s, and health officials) stick to their guns advocating scaling up antiretroviral clinical trials, vaccine research, and programs using existing antiretroviral drugs, especially when directed at “mother-to-child transmission.”

I wanted to ask “transmission of what?” The simple God’s truth answer is “transmission of poverty.”

NIGERIA – THE COUNTRY

At about 140 million in the standard demographic yearbooks, Nigeria is the eighth most populous country and accounts for 20 percent of the world’s Black people. It is predominantly rural but with some of Africa’s largest cities, huge urban conglomerations marked by the same lack of clean water, sanitation, and infrastructure as the countryside. Nigerians joke that their children are so strong because nowhere else in Africa do they have to walk so far to the store and to fetch clean water.*

The U.S. has at least one million people of direct Nigerian ancestry (not counting our slave ancestry population), only the UK and Nigeria itself have larger populations. In the U.S., Nigerians have a significantly higher than average educational level; many serve in the U.S. military—some for accelerated citizenship advantages—and all of them experience some of the disadvantage and exclusion common to all Black people in the U.S. (differential imprisonment, poorer health care and housing, lower salaries).]

Nigeria was giving its independence from the UK in 1960 under the influence of the wave of African independence movements. A typical condition of that transition was consolidating—not seeking to limit—divisions in the country. There are regions (Southern, Western and Northern, now in 36 federal states), peoples (Yoruba, Igbo, and others) and religions (Muslim and Christian). Thus disequilibrium, along with continued commercial dominance by the colonizing world, direct military and political interference in Nigerian internal affairs, and the usual corrupt elections and internal conflicts kept Nigeria in turmoil. In that context—called “fishing in troubled waters”—the U.S. and European private corporations continued to control Nigeria’s natural resource wealth (principally oil and gas) and the underpaid labor of its growing population, bringing it firmly into the sphere of influence of these corporations and their committees of government.

The country has remained predominantly rural and in need of clean water, sanitation, sustained national campaigns against malaria and TB, and infrastructure development. Nigeria also needs medical training institutions, city clinics and rural medical services. However, Nigeria is also the sixth largest OPEC oil producer—that is, by January 2007 levels of production, which are set by U.S./Saudi influence to sustain high per barrel prices—and is soon expected to supply a quarter of all U.S. petroleum  In spite of this wealth, none of Nigeria’s health needs are being met. Zero. Nada.

Nigeria also has been made into one of the U.S. government’s sources of men-at-arms (sent to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Darfur, Yugoslavia, East-Timor, DR Congo), a U.S. ally in the “War on Terror,” and its “policeman in Africa.”

Although the IMF literature records a nine percent economic growth (2006), no realistic Nigerian expects even its most rudimentary health needs to be met in the foreseeable future. And yet the facts of life create a considerable pressure for change. We can expect to hear of “conflict,” to see unfavorable press coverage, and to sense dangers ahead for Nigeria. If you want a foretaste of the dangers you can read a bit about Nigeria’s “Civil War” from 1967-1970 (Biafra) or current detail from the Niger Delta, or look into Cabinda in Angola, or Doba in Chad. These are oil enclaves, all of considerable importance to the world’s private billionaires.

NIGERIA AND THE MAKING OF FILMS

All this is background for your understanding of AIDS in Nigeria, “a nation on the threshold. Also as background I want you to know that Nigerians are great film-makers. Their film industry is third largest in the world after the U.S. and India. Much of that industry is as contaminated by commerce as their water by pollution. Nevertheless, the HIV/AIDS industry and health care in Nigeria are being powerfully chronicaled in documentaries, some by people like I who support the banner here. Whether set in Nigeria or in Tanzania, Uganda, Sierra Leone, or South Africa, I await these films. But not those made with Gates Foundation money. Now I have read the Foundation’s AIDS in Nigeria and recognize it principle intent.

Of the films to come you will get no previews or spoilers here. Instead I want to mention a 2004 BBC documentary titled “Guinea Pig Kids” based on initial investigative reporting by a city journalist Liam Scheff. This film is about poor, inner city New York children who were subjected to clinical trials of high-toxicity antiretroviral drugs and taken away from their parents and guardians by city authorities and placed in city children’s homes or foster homes when the parents or guardians objected to continuing the drug regimen on their children.

Asked why the National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration did not restrain the drug corporations, Scheff replies:

The NIH and the FDA are the drug companies. It’s unclear anymore where one stops and another begins. It’s the same if I say that General Dynamics and Raytheon are the Department of Defense. The NIH is an organization that works as a liaison between the drug companies and the public they too often pretend to serve. The job of the NIH is to keep drug companies in business, and less and less to serve the public.

After the film’s release, the NY Center for HIV Law and Policy under Jeanne Bergman objected to the “Guinea Pig Kids” and threatening legal action. Bergman is also founder of AIDStruth.org, a website trying to discredit any criticism or questioning of the HIV/AID industry, HIV orthodoxy, or it pharmaceutical industry sponsors. She has persisted with her campaign against the BBC and effectively prevented them from publicizing and distributing the film.

AIDStruth.org’s position is:

It will not “Engage in any public or private debate with AIDS denialists . . . . The reasons are: the debate has been settled: HIV causes AIDS, AIDS kills, and AIDS can be treated with significant success by the use of antiretroviral therapy. These are the facts.”

And yet, increasingly, “denialist” statements take the form of this one from Celia Farber:

I have been told and have reported and have imprinted upon my soul that for some people, at some stages of immune collapse, these drugs have helped, and maybe even prevented a slide into death. [However, I also know from Roberto Giraldo and other experts] that severe immune deficiency—which may be a more useful term than “AIDS”—occurs only where severe depletion of vital nutrients has occurred; reversing the illness starts with restoring those nutrients not with courses of treatment with antiretroviral cocktails.

Naturally microbiologist Peter Duesberg does not talk in this way. His comment on his own work might be “This is science, not personal revelation or publicity. I must be blunt and direct or I certainly will be ignored.” I expect the Nigerian film-makers to approach their work in the same spirit.

The practice of Bergman and AIDStruth.org is to insist that opposition to the orthodox view that HIV=AIDS is wing-nut stuff, a conspiracy theory, similar to the “popular” (meaning by uneducated people) denials of evolution, the holocaust, and mental illness. They condemn the Internet, which “gives access to all sorts of people” for propagating the writings of those who oppose the “AIDS crusade.” They also condemn the opposition for “attempting to create an impression of scientific authority” by constantly citing and reproducing the scientific literature against HIV=AIDS on websites, out there, that is to say, in front of “all sorts of people.”

Celia Farber’s Harper’s article and then her book first persuaded me to look at the question of HIV/AIDS “orthodoxy” and subsequently read the eminently orthodox coffee table book AIDS in Nigeria. However it was the Internet that gave me access to scientific articles, to Duesberg’s Inventing the Aids Virus, his Infectious AIDS and Harvey Bialy’s Oncogenes Aneuploidy and AIDS—all providing access to eminently respectable refereed science journal articles.

Now I too know that the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy was wrong to claim their victory over AIDS, wrong in claiming their drugs “reversed the tide of death” in the 1990s in the U.S., wrong in insisting that the world, and especially Africa, needs a massive scaling up in the use of their drugs, their patented HIV tests, and the clinical tests they run based on widely and responsibly questioned notions of heterosexual transmission and mother-to-child transmission.

To my mind, by definition, sex, birth, and nursing are the sources of health of our phenomenally healthy species. Our cup of health is 99% full not 99% empty. Those who suggest that we (and/or the Nigerians) are a catastrophe, a calamity, a cataclysm, and threatened with extinction are up to no good. They may have powerful allies such as the Gates Foundation but it is completely clear that they put their revenue, their profits, and/or stock price above health.

Perhaps Jamie Doran, who directed “Guinea Pig Kids,” did make a tactical mistake in linking her expose of “futile,” “dangerous” and “experimental” drugs with the rather different legal issue of trampling on parental rights. The BBC “adjudicated” the issue and found such linking of “unrelated issues” was a serious fault. Other film-markers (out of lack of legal sophistication, out of anger, whatever) may also make mistakes. Just as many “denialists” have certainly made mistakes. But, really, in summation, it is like the excellent Celia Farber says in the above cited article:

How [HIV/AIDS] came to be the dominant scientific religion is a subject of infinite complexity and tragedy. The virus (which is actually a retrovirus, of a class that was never thought to be pathogenic prior to 1984, and which we all harbor shards of in our germline) provided. . . a focus for a gigantic industry as well as an international corporation called AIDS Inc. The natural and true history of AIDS is only beginning to be told.

If you are interested, she recommends starting at the beginning with Michelle Cochrane’s The Making of An Epidemic (2003) described as a rigorously detailed semantic, medical, and sociological examination of the first AIDS cases among Gay men in San Francisco. I intend to read it.**

Now we are 26 years from those tragedies and I writing about a far, far greater tragedy in Nigeria. When AIDS Inc. is forced to shift its focus to Africa, where racism—no matter the “denial”—has been an excuse for rape and plunder for 150 years, the HIV/AIDS denialists need to be taken most seriously. And imagine if it were India or China?

Jim

* 25 athletes won metals for Nigeria in the Beijing Olympics, but 18 of those are from the soccer event. The country was far from reaching their goal of eight gold metals. Training for the 2012 London games will begin immediately. I know the world champion sprinter and gold medalist Christine Ohuruogo is from Nigerian parents in London but I don’t know who many like her reached the awards platform. The Olympics are only sports also—our nation’s greatest pacifier after alcohol—but I find the Olympics a moving symbol of a people’s vitality. I mean just look at China.

** I also made a note to point out some indications of a reversal of scientific opinion on the long-dominant HIV=AIDS orthodoxy.  Leave it as said.  And note the appearance of serious challenges to the entire existence of UNAID, the principal UN agency for AIDS, Inc., as being unnecessary and contrary to the major thrust for health in Africa of the World Health Organization.  Note also that Peter Duesberg and Celia Faber have just recently been named for awards in a Library of Congress hosted celebration of medical whistle-blowers.  See here and here where we can read these sketches of Duesberg and Faber among others:

Peter H. Duesberg, Ph.D. – Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, – Dr. Duesberg questioned the infectious nature of the AIDS virus as early as 1992, publishing of the state of HIV/AIDS research.  The scientific world retaliated and successfully silenced him despite the overwhelming evidence he presented.  All vaccination studies were recently stopped because they failed.

Celia Farber – After Harper’s Magazine published her article, "Out of control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science," Ms. Farber has been unable to get anymore of her articles published despite the support of .

Far less significant, I suspect, is the tinkering and adjustments I note in the Gates Foundation web site and in its print literature where, to be brief, contributions against malaria and TB now receive more prominence.