HIV/AIDS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

SA: President Mbeki: 'Aids scientists are latter-day Nazi-concentration camp doctors...'

Date Posted: Tuesday 06-Nov-2007

Two-million people have already died of AIDS in South Africa  -- yet SA President Thabo Mbeki still told biographer Mark Gevisser this past year that he is a "profound sceptic".

(Note: 2 million may not be a true figure as many deaths have been put down to other illnesses in the past.)

Gevisser describes the matter in his book "Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred."

The president made certain that Gevisser got insight into a 100-page paper secretly authored by Mbeki and distributed anonymously among the ANC leadership six years ago.

This compared Aids scientists to latter-day Nazi concentration camp doctors.


In it, Mbeki also portrayed black people who accepted orthodox Aids science as "self-repressed" victims of a slave mentality.    It also describes the "HIV/Aids thesis" as entrenched in "centuries-old white racist beliefs and concepts about Africans".

"There is no question as to the message Thabo Mbeki was delivering to me along with this document: he was now, as he had been since 1999, an Aids dissident," the author writes.

The president told him ..."The presentation of the matter, which is actually quite wrong, is that the major killer disease on the African continent is HIV/Aids, this is really going to decimate the African population! So your biggest threat is not unemployment or racism or globalisation, your biggest threat which will really destroy South Africa is this one!"

Yet, as the book points out, the government's own statistics show the effect of Aids in South Africa has been "catastrophic" with more than 2-million people already dead and one in eight of the working-age population now infected with HIV.

Mbeki blocked the distribution of anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs in public hospitals for years because he believed pharmaceutical companies were overstating the link between HIV and Aids to sell drugs, and underplaying the toxic side effects of ARVs.

"When I asked him in 2007 how he felt about having to withdraw from the Aids debate, he told me it was 'very unfortunate' that his initiative had been 'drowned'" writes Gevisser.


Source URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/southafrica/story/0%2C%2C2205896%2C00.html

Posted By: Adriana
Adriana Stuijt Websites: CensorBugBear

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SA - World Soccer Cup 2010 could cause an XDR-TB epidemic world-wide

Date Posted: Tuesday 01-Jan-2008 from African Crisis web-site.

During the World Soccer Cup 2010 being held in South Africa, at least 350,000 air-travellers are going to descend on South Africa.    They will be accommodated in the country's hospitality industry -- however an industry which has a seriously-flawed health-control system.

The story posted just below my commentary shows how difficult it is even in the best health care systems in the world, to stop XDR-TB-infected people from infecting hundreds of others on any airplane flight.

South Africa has at least 4-million people now co-infected with TB+ AIDS (Stats: Medisines Sans Frontierers). These people are using a huge variety of antibiotic and antiretroviral drugs to keep fighting the destruction of their immune system.   They thus become so resistant to these drugs that they usually die of Extremely-Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis.    The official number of XDR-TB deaths in South Africa stands at 400 - but that statistic dates back to October 2006, when news reporters actually bothered to pick up on the fact that a huge number of people were dying very quickly in one specific TB-hospital.
These facts had been known to the SA health authorities since at least 2002 and it's an indication of the high level of censorship in South Africa that they have managed to keep this deadly epidemic silent for four full years!    Only once TB-experts inside SA started ringing the international alarm bells, did the international news media finally pick up on the story.

Hospitality employees NOT ALLOWED to be tested for TB under SA law:

What none of these stories have ever mentioned however is that under South African so-called 'privacy-rights' laws, job-applicants are NOT allowed to undergo any testing for any kind of infectious diseases such as TB - even in the hospitality sector.     So anyone in the hospitality industry, where such employees come into frequent contact with members of the public, none of the SA employers are allowed to even know if their employees preparing and serving food for restaurant patrons are infected or not.

In most Western countries, it is actually illegal for hospitality-industry employers to have any employees with infectious diseases serving any members of the public.

The owners of hospitality-sites caught doing this, face closure of their establishments and severe fines, sometimes even criminal charges if any of their patrons' health suffered because of it.

And in these countries, health inspectorates are in place to check the cleanliness and health of restaurants, which usually include routine health checks on the employees including TB-tests and X-rays.    These health checks often are a legal requirement which hospitality-industry employees have to undergo each year in the interest of the greater public good - i.e. to stop epidemics from spreading.

Please read the following story thoroughly - keeping in mind those hundreds of thousands of foreign travellers who will be descending on South Africa during the WC2010 and making use of the SA hospitality industry.

"TB-infected Nepalese woman boards American Airlines flight, prompting health scare:

"Health officials are searching for dozens of international passengers who may have flown from India and in the United States with a (Nepalese) woman infected with a hard-to-treat form of tuberculosis.

The 30-year-old woman, who authorities declined to identify is under treatment in a San Francisco Bay Area hospital.

She arrived in San Francisco December 13 aboard an American Airlines flight that she boarded in New Delhi, India.

Only about a week after the flight landed, the woman showed up at the Stanford Hospital emergency room with advanced symptoms of the disease.

Hospital spokesman Gary Migdol said that the woman is being treated in isolation and is in a stable condition.

Fenstersheib said the woman will remain hospitalised until she tests negative for the disease: she has 'a strain of the disease that resists the most common antibiotics, (i.e. Multiple or Extremely-Drug-resistant-TB)"

CDC: TESTING 44 PEOPLE IN 17 STATES FOR TB-INFECTION - RESULTS TAKE 8 WEEKS:
The flight stopped in Chicago before continuing to San Francisco International.
Health officials said she was already diagnosed with TB in India and knew it -- but boarded the flight anyway.

US officials have little authority over who boards incoming international flights - however such passengers are typically barred from boarding flights originating in the United States.

"She did have symptoms on the flight," said Santa Clara County Health Director Dr Marty Fenstersheib. "She was coughing."

Officials with the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention are asking health authorities in 17 states to contact 44 people who sat within two rows of the woman and urge them get checked for tuberculosis. The risk of infection is far lower than passing on influenza or the common cold, doctors said.

"TB requires pretty constant contact with someone. About 1 to 2% of all tuberculosis cases are of the multi-drug resistant variety.," he said.
This doctor is either downright stupid about TB, or is lying outright: TB baccillii are passed along in aerosol droplets, i.e. through the air shared by surrounding passengers.

The CDC and World Health Organisations have drawn up new guidelines and also published the results of studies how TB is spread onboard air flights.

Read their following reports:

SEE PAGE 31, showing the seating proximity which together with the air-quality and length of time passengers are exposed to such TB-bacillii from fellow-travellers.

On older planes, where the same air is re-circulated repeatedly, exposure risks are greater. Even in modern planes with modern filtering systems, the air is re-circulated 50% of the time.

Even HEP-filters do not filter out all the harmful bacteria, it has been found:
Report 2006 "Tuberculosis and Air Travel", World Health Organisation:
http://www.who.int/tb/publications/2006/who_h...

CDC report: "Exposure of Passengers and Flight Crew to Mycobacterium tuberculosis on Commercial Aircraft, 1992-1995. guidelines for prevention and control."
http://www.cdc.gov/MMWR/preview/mmwrhtml/0003...

CDC spokeswoman Shelly Diaz said it will take more than eight weeks to receive definitive results.
Source URL: http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_2245223,00.html

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