30 April 2004 - BBC informs us that "Aids has killed 2 million Nigerians", and that another 3.8 million are infected by the HIV virus. Only South Africa and India are said to have more people infected. The article goes on to say that Nigeria "has been criticised for not doing enough to fight Aids" and that a big problem seems to "raise awareness" about the disease.
A few days later, we read that in South Africa, Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi has revealed that his son died of Aids, "breaking the taboo" about Aids in that country. Obviously we are to come to the conclusion that the reason we hear little about Aids from the African people themselves, is that they are ashamed to talk of it - that there is a taboo which must be overcome if ever we are going to effectively fight Aids.
BBC this time also accompanies the article with a photo of protesters who seem to say the government "is not doing enough", presumably because it is not distributing retroviral drugs.
If you have read my recent article titled "HIV-Aids: A Tragic Error" you may remember that not only has the HIV virus never been proven to cause any disease, but, as Neville Hodgkinson explains in his historic documentation, it has not even been scientifically isolated. The virus was "announced" at a press conference - almost exactly 20 years ago - but there was never any scientific debate on the "fine points", such as its isolation from patients' serum, or its ability to cause the immune weakness observed in those who are said to suffer from Aids. Press coverage took the place of science.
Consequently, the HIV tests which are used to tell a person whether he/she may live or will have to die of Aids, have never been validated against an isolation of a virus, they therefore are completely incapable of giving any certain indication of "infection" by HIV. Kim Marie Bannon, who was tested and told she had Aids and was to die more than a decade ago is now suing the test kit manufacturers in a case filed under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act. She says that the tests are based on the scientific equivalent of clay feet....
Could the campaign for more and more funding for toxic AZT and other retrovirals to be sold in Africa, India and presumably in several other lesser developed nations, be nothing but a clever promotional trick of the pharmaceutical multinationals? Professor Jens Jerndal certainly seems to think so. He explains how Aids statistics are "worked" to make us believe we are facing a mortal threat when in fact the epidemic, if ever there was one, has been on a downtrend ever since the early '90s.
His article is required reading for anyone wishing to understand what is happening in Africa and why we are supposed to send toxic medication there when what the Africans need is clean water, a nutritious meal, and better sanitation.
SMOKE AND MIRRORS - the great illusionist numbers called Aids statistics
PROFESSOR JENS JERNDAL
M.D.(MA), D.Sc.h.c., M.Sc., B.A.., F.W.A.I.M.
Statistics are supposedly the rock solid foundation of modern science, a science exclusively concerned with objectively determined quantities, measurements and numbers. Unfortunately, it is easy to produce erroneous or biased statistical results unintentionally by just overlooking certain complicated and specific rules for sampling or weighing the data. But the most fascinating thing about statistics is that a clever statistician can work magic with the numbers and quite intentionally create the illusion of proving or disproving almost anything.
The subject of AIDS statistics is a showcase of illusionists at work. It is clearly manufactured to order, using several illusionist tricks to inflate the numbers to where they will inspire sufficient terror or panic in the population at large, to enable those in power to introduce exceptional measures or control over the population by means of force, such as mandatory "medical" interventions, and constraints in the freedom of movement and behaviour. Somewhat like a curfew to control a situation of political upheaval or war.
For the moment, lets ignore the possible reasons for such a power play, and just look into the way AIDS statistics are de facto manipulated intentionally in order to convey a grossly distorted impression of the underlying reality, with unfounded alarmist projections for the future.
What are the illusionist tricks I am talking about? First of all, a cumulative technique of reporting is used, which is never used for other illnesses, and which has no other rationale or utility than to give the impression that the numbers are much greater than they really are, and growing. So rather than reporting how many new AIDS cases have been registered in a particular year, you are likely to be fed the total accumulated number since the beginning of reporting. This gives more impact, and perhaps it makes you think that it is an annual figure.
A second technique liberally used in AIDS reporting, is to now and then change the basis for the numbers included, especially when the figures do not conform to expectations. This has been done in various ways, the most important probably being the widening of the definitions of what is diagnosed as AIDS. For instance, new so called AIDS-defining illnesses have been added, so that now at least 29 different illnesses - all existing on their own before AIDS entered the stage - are considered as AIDS, when they are accompanied by a positive so called HIV test (actually only a non-specific test that may react to more than 60 different conditions that have nothing to do with either AIDS or HIV).
It is easy to understand that the more illnesses are included, the greater the number of people affected by any of them. That is one of the ways by which AIDS can be shown to increase in numbers, when the dry, clean facts are showing the opposite.
Official statistics actually show that the number of new AIDS cases in the USA peaked in 1992, and has steadily decreased since then. Not the impression you get from media, US authorities or UN agencies, is it?
It is important to be a aware of the fact that in Africa no HIV test is required for an AIDS diagnosis. Any illness that lasts more than a month and has certain symptoms will automatically be diagnosed as AIDS. All those illnesses have existed always, and were common long before there was any such thing as AIDS. That is one of many reasons for the inflated number of AIDS cases in Africa. But even with this liberal definition, the real numbers fall far short of the numbers you see in the newspapers.
The reason for this is that the figures you keep seeing are not based on facts, but on generously creative "estimates", liberally spiced up with imaginative but unfounded "projections" for the future. Obviously, it is preferable to use "estimates" whenever possible, since these can be inflated at will, rather than sticking to the less glamorous numbers of existing records. Besides, when one wants to publish the number of "HIV-infected", estimates are the only option, since there is no way of knowing that figure. Only a very small percentage is ever submitted to the antibody test, falsely claimed to be an "HIV test", so it's a free for all to estimate the numbers. If only the number of correctly diagnosed "full-blown AIDS" cases were reported, the figures would certainly not cause much of a stir, let alone panic.
In a recent report from the US it was claimed that at least a third of all HIV positive people don't even know it themselves! If they do not know it themselves, and have never taken a test, then how could the reporter, or whatever source he used, know that these people are HIV-positive? AIDS statistics are full of this kind of absurd and nonsensical assertion, but nobody seems to notice, let alone react.
One of the few factual sources of African AIDS statistics, is antibody (so called HIV) tests in pregnant women at a few public maternity centres. The test results reportedly show that a very high percentage are "HIV positive". Why? Because there are more than 60 different medical conditions that may give a false positive test result, and among these is pregnancy itself! Others are vaccinations and recent infections, such as hepatitis, malaria, tuberculosis, and influenza.
Considering that the test is performed on pregnant women, when pregnancy is one of the acknowledged causes for a false positive outcome, and considering that the mostly poor and often undernourished women who come to these centres are likely to have been exposed to several of the other conditions as well, it is predictable that a high percentage of them should test positive. However, this does not mean that they are actually HIV-positive, and it certainly does not mean that they will ever have to develop AIDS.
Yet, these evidently inaccurate and essentially meaningless test results are computed and applied to the entire African population, men as well as women. Old and young, rich and poor. As if they would apply equally to all, and as if they were proof of the incidence of AIDS. Neither of these is the case, and anyone with rudimentary knowledge of the tests, and of statistics, must be aware of it. Yet this is how statistics on AIDS in Africa are manufactured and publicized.
Incidentally, apart from the more than 60 common causes for a false positive test result, it has been proved that test results for one and the same person may vary from one occasion to another, and from one country to another. The reason is that there is no "gold standard" for the test, meaning that it is arbitrary exactly from where on a scale a positive result is registered. And this kind of test is used to tell people that they will die of AIDS, and that they have to take obscenely expensive medicines that make them desperately ill and even kill them, but can never cure them.
This is the background for South African President Mbeki’s reluctance to offer these not only ineffective but fatally harmful drugs at the Government’s expense to pregnant women and new-born children, and indeed to anyone. And very good reason he has for it too.
One study reportedly showed that a group of young men who tested HIV-positive had a higher death rate than a group that did not test positive for HIV, and anybody reading this would automatically assume that all those HIV-positive men died of AIDS. However, the study did not show what actually caused the deaths in the HIV-positive group. When this was investigated, it turned out that there may in this case have been a correlation between an HIV-positive test and a slightly higher death rate, but the same correlation did not show up for AIDS disease. Most of those deaths were not caused by AIDS. A typical case of statistical smoke and mirrors!
In Africa, the reporting of AIDS cases is furthermore based on widely differing criteria in different areas, or by different agencies. The fact that for AIDS cases there seem to be financial support, while this is not the case for old illnesses, also prompts those involved to report any illness as AIDS, when in fact they are classic cases of tuberculosis, malaria or other old endemic African illnesses.
Interestingly, tuberculosis and malaria, both very common in Africa, have – among many others – been included in the so-called AIDS-defining illnesses, and all of them can also give a false positive result in the so called HIV test. Smart, isn’t it? See the smoke and mirrors?
According to official estimates by UNAIDS at the end of 2000, some 36.1 million people world-wide were "infected" and "living with HIV/AIDS". Of these, 25.3 million are said to live in Sub-Saharan Africa. My question to this figure is: How does anyone know? In the third world, AIDS can be diagnosed without the so called HIV test, but "HIV infection" cannot be, and it is a fact that very few people are being tested, and that those who have actually tested positive only make up an infinitesimal portion of the 36.1 million UNAIDS claims are "living with HIV". So how does UNAIDS make up the rest?
Typically, no distinction is made between just being HIV-positive while healthy, and actually being ill with "full-blown" AIDS, as if it were the same thing! This is another of the many smoke screens.
The same source estimated (!) the number of new infections in 2000 to be 5.3 million, globally. The estimated (!) number of total deaths from AIDS (observe the cumulative reporting) is said to be 21.8 million. Since we know that extremely few HIV tests are being performed in Africa due to the high costs, we cannot help asking what the basis is for these estimates. And this even more so since we know that the number of officially registered deaths from AIDS adds up to only a fraction of the estimates propagated by UNAIDS, since the beginning of the "epidemic" nearly twenty years ago. And this in spite of all the described reasons for inflating AIDS statistics in Africa.
One argument offered by the statistical inflationists to explain this discrepancy is that most AIDS deaths are reported as something else, either because people do not want to admit that their relatives died of such a shameful disease, or even that they did not know it was AIDS! But those who do the estimates apparently know. Without any HIV-testing. One wonders how. Purely on a hunch? Something does not add up here.
So what else can we do to conjure up the impression that AIDS is a fast spreading pandemic threatening to wipe out the entire world population? One thing is to pick out the age group that has the lowest death rate of all, say young people between 20 and 30, and find that AIDS (or more likely the "antivirals" prescribed for it) is "the leading cause of death" for this group. Be sure not to disclose the actual percentage, as it is so small it would take the effect away. But since few people in this age group die from natural causes, AIDS can be construed to be "the leading cause" or at least "a leading cause" of death in this group, along with suicide and accidents.
Publishing this with enough fanfare, the public will easily draw the false conclusion that AIDS is a leading cause of death, period. Or that at least a very high percentage of the age group in question is dying of AIDS, when the true death rate in AIDS even in this selected age group may be as low as a fraction of one percent. Now you see it – now you don’t! This is one way the illusionists perform their statistical magic without actually lying. Finally, we can play the effectual orphan card, again estimating (!) all the millions of orphans to AIDS. Without mentioning that the definition of an orphan is any child that has lost one or both parents in any way at all, and there is no reliable documentation to say how many of those missing parents actually died of AIDS, or even died at all. By far the most common reason for missing parents in Africa is the wars that have been raging on the continent for decades.
A recent example from India gives an illustration of what is going on. Official statistics to be presented to the UN said India had 560,000 AIDS orphans – with only 17,000 accumulated AIDS deaths since the beginning of the "pandemic"! During a press conference, a journalist asked Dr. David Miller, the Country Representative of UNAIDS where they got these figures of AIDS orphans from. He had no answer.
The Indian Health Minister referred the matter to the person who handles data collection of HIV/AIDS figures for the Government. He said there were no estimates on the number of AIDS orphans in India. When Dr. Miller was asked what his source of the estimate was, he said, "I cannot disclose the source, I will have to speak to my colleagues in Geneva about it."
Another thing that has never stopped fascinating me, is how supposedly professional and responsible public agencies like the WHO can know that - for example - the incidence of HIV (often interpreted as equal to AIDS) in African teenage girls has increased by 26 % (or whatever percentage reported) from one year to the next. What is their source for this kind of figures? – Is it from one school where they tested a few girls last year and test another few this year? This year perhaps just after they were vaccinated, or had their annual bout of flu? Or was it limited to pregnant teenagers? How many girls were tested? How was it done? When? Where? Can we see the studies, please!
Most people don’t realize that often when a percentage is given for a country or group of people, only a small number of people have actually been investigated. The percentage found in that small sample is then accepted as applying to the whole country, or the whole group, however great the risk is that those investigated are not representative of the whole country or group. A knowledgeable statistician who wants to cheat, can usually do his sampling in such a way as to favour a certain outcome, without manipulating the numbers as such.
To round off this exposure of the statistical illusionists, I will give a dramatic example of what can hide behind statistically expressed reliability of the test for HIV.
A test for HIV is reported to be 98% accurate. Let’s for the sake of the argument assume that this is a correct assessment. Since in our culture we are hypnotized by numbers and quantities, percentages and majorities, this will sound very reassuring to most people. But what can that statistical truth mean for individual people in real life? Let’s have a look.
In a sample of the average American population, the estimate for HIV prevalence is in the order of 0.04%, or 4 per 10,000 people. Assuming we test 100,000 Americans, we would then expect to find 40 true HIV positive persons. This means that the remaining 99,960 persons are HIV negative. However, since the test is only 98% accurate, it may falsely identify 2% of these 99,960 people as HIV positive. That would be 1,999 persons! So in this example, out of 2,039 people who test positive, only 40 are actually positive. That means 98% of those identified by the test as "HIV positive" are not positive at all. In other words, the test, that is said to be 98% accurate and thus approved for commercial use, is in fact 98% inaccurate, looked at from the point of view of those who tested positive.
Imagine the fate of those 1,999 healthy people, told they will soon get AIDS, and bullied, intimidated or seduced by the medical establishment into taking AZT or similar drugs to "delay the onset of AIDS". Quite apart from the enormous cost of this treatment (and profit to the pharmaceutical business), how many of them do you think will survive the ordeal?