HIV Dissidents and their dangers in our African community

Dear Readers of AISD news!

I am pleased to introduce the work of Seth Kalichman, Ph.D. I hope that we will all benefit from his huge experience and sharpen our understanding with regard to a minority but yet outspoken and militants who can bring lies and negative arguments to deny the reality we have to deal with as African people in the UK and beyond.

Seth short introduction:

Seth Kalichman is a clinical-community psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut. He has dedicated his career to preventing the spread of HIV and improving the health of people living with HIV/AIDS. His research program is focused in the southeastern United States and South Africa. He is also the editor of AIDS and Behavior, a leading social and behavioral science peer-reviewed journal. He is the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, published by Springer Science. All of the royalties from Denying AIDS are donated to purchase HIV treatments in Africa. Visit his author's blog at http://denyingaids.blogspot.com/.

Please read what he has to say:

Does HIV really exist? And if it does exist, can it cause harm?
They're ridiculous questions, of course. If you're reading this, there's a 99.9 percent chance you agree that HIV does exist and it can cause harm. After all, the virus has been isolated in laboratories.1,2 We have blood tests that can determine how much of the virus lives inside a person's body.3-5 Scientists have even taken pictures and videos of it.6
And, of course, there is also the terrible, mind-numbing, physical proof of what HIV can do. Globally, more than 25 million people have died from the virus in the past 30 years, and 33 million people are estimated to be living with HIV right now.7
Just 12 years ago, being diagnosed with HIV was almost invariably a death sentence in the developed world.
But then, right around 1996, the skies cleared, hope spread and men and women started regaining weight and strength. Thanks to focused research, amazing scientific discoveries and the tireless work of activists, combination antiretroviral therapy brought new life to HIV-positive people who thought they had none left. Within a few years the AIDS floors in AIDS-designed hospitals throughout the U.S. emptied out.


What do you think is the most important area of HIV treatment research today?

• Figuring out when, and with what, to start HIV treatment
• Developing new meds for people with HIV drug resistance
• Finding ways to fight HIV besides antiretrovirals
• Creating HIV meds that don't cause difficult side effects
• Finding causes for metabolic and cardiovascular problems in HIVers
• Learning how gender and race affect the way HIV and meds work
• Finding a cure
  

None of these

Many HIV-positive people who took these new antiretroviral medications shook off death and slowly regained their energy.8 Some even grew strong enough to return to work and some HIV-positive women felt confident enough to fulfill their dream of having a child. This transformation was one of the most amazing success stories of modern medicine.
Speak to a person living with HIV who survived the early years of the epidemic, and you can still hear the wonder in his or her voice, as well as sense the mourning and even disbelief with respect to the hundreds of thousands of people who suffered a nightmarish litany of illnesses and died and couldn't partake in the miracle.
Yet there exists a small group of people oblivious to these remarkable successes. And it's not a world of people with any actual hands-on experience: None work in HIV medicine providing care or conducting HIV research. None seem to have witnessed the miraculous rebound of so many HIV-positive people after their initiation of HAART [highly active antiretroviral therapy]. None of them volunteer or work for any of the hundreds of HIV/AIDS organizations across the U.S. catering mostly to poor and underinsured people living with HIV. None are AIDS activists who have transformed HIV care and policy.
No, these people scoff from afar at the successes against HIV. They call themselves "AIDS dissidents." We in the HIV community call them "denialists." They are led somewhat indirectly by a tenured professor named Peter Duesberg, who is not a medical doctor. Together, this small but vocal group of people write and theorize and blog. It's like a hobby for them.
And even though they have no hands-on experience -- remember they have no medical training and no first-hand experience with patient care -- they claim to know more about HIV than all the HIV physicians, nurses and activists in the world. Among their claims is that HIV does not cause AIDS, because either HIV does not exist9 or, if it does exist, it is harmless.10 Other denialists claim that HIV tests aren't accurate.11
In the denialists' conspiratorial worldview, we've all been bought off -- I've been bought off, all the HIV specialists, all the HIV nurses, all the HIV organizations in the entire world have been bought off. Anyone who doesn't agree with them they imply is corrupt, has no integrity, has no humanity and is in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry.

Denying AIDS by Seth Kalichman, Ph.D. To view an excerpt from Denying AIDS, click here.It's an impossible scenario, if you think about it. No one can control that many people. But they believe it and they are looking for willing recruits who'll buy into their theories.
Every now and again, this group wins a dollop of attention from the media. But this attention is always short-lived and the denialist movement retreats back into well-deserved obscurity.
So why am I talking about them? Because even though they're irrelevant, they can still do damage. Each HIV-positive person who is pulled in by their misinformation and ends up not starting life-saving HIV treatment is one life that may be lost. Denialists can only be ignored to a certain extent. It's our responsibility to inform the world about HIV, and that includes informing the world about the harmful information that denialists dish out.
The question is: Why do these people do what they do? Why do they continue to deny the truth about HIV and AIDS? Why do they persist in the face of overwhelming evidence? We'll be looking at this subject in this, as well as the next, episode of This Month in HIV. First, we'll meet someone who went underground and learned how this group works. In our next episode, we'll talk to patients who have been duped by them and well-known activists who have dealt with them.
So let me welcome clinical psychologist Seth Kalichman, who is also a professor of social psychology at the University of Connecticut. He recently completed a fascinating book, titled Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, in which he looked into this odd group of people. He'll try to help us understand how the AIDS denialist movement came to be and what keeps it going.

Let us know what you think of this important debate and your learning from Seth.

Thanks

AISD editors

HIV in the UK African Communities

HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which is a virus that can damage the body's defence system so it cannot fight off some infections. If a person with HIV goes on to get certain serious illnesses, this condition is called AIDS, which stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. There is currently no cure for HIV or AIDS, and no vaccine is available to prevent people from becoming infected with HIV. Men who have sex with men remain the group most affected in the UK, but more heterosexual men and women have been diagnosed with the virus in recent years.

Africans have a poor rate of late presenting of their HIV results which lead to more and more people having to die of infections related to AIDS. Following medical advancement and HIV successful treatments in the UK, people who are dignosed with HIV can live full lives

HIV is a long term chronic condition but it is till a danger to African people because of deep stigma attached to people who live with it. It is time we leave this life style behind. We need to get educate ourselves and progress with medical technology in the 21 century. People with HIV contribute in our economy and they can enjoy and achieve more if we as a community treat them well with respect and dignity

AISD

New Citizenship Development in the UK

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/

Home Office: 'Support our wars or you'll be denied a UK passport'
New rules on citizenship could bar immigrants who use the ancient British right to protest
By Jane Merrick, Political Editor
Sunday, 2 August 2009
Immigrants who take part in protests against British troops could be denied citizenship of this country under controversial new Home Office rules.
The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, will launch a consultation tomorrow on a new points-based system for would-be migrants according to their behaviour, as well as skills and qualifications.
Mr Johnson, writing in the News of the World, said: "Bad behaviour will be penalised, and only those with enough points will earn the right to a British passport."
While he did not explicitly point to those who take part in anti-war demonstrations, the newspaper reported that this would be included in examples of "bad behaviour".
But there was confusion over the policy last night, as the Home Office appeared to backtrack on whether protesters would be penalised.
An aide to Mr Johnson said the Home Office was consulting on what constituted bad behaviour, but refused to comment on the issue of protesters.
Earlier this year, troops on a homecoming march in Luton were jeered by Muslim protesters carrying placards that read "Butchers" and "Animals". However, there was no suggestion that the protesters were, in fact, immigrants, so the alleged rules would not apply in any case.
While inciting hatred is a crime, the suggestion that taking part in an anti-war protest could be a bar to a British passport would be highly controversial and draw accusations of pandering to the right.
The new rules would also see the period for which foreigners have to work in the UK before becoming eligible for citizenship doubling from five to 10 years. Applicants from outside the EU are already subject to a points-based system that covers skills, but the tougher rules would sever the "link between temporary work and becoming a permanent UK citizen", Mr Johnson wrote.
"Already we require that people earn the right to become citizens by paying taxes, speaking English and obeying the law," Mr Johnson added. "Tomorrow I will go even further, unveiling my new citizenship proposals which will require that people earn points for, among other things, their skills, their job and their qualifications."
As Mr Johnson risked charges of playing tough on immigration, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, stoked the row over the Conservative Party's new alliance with the far right in Europe. Mr Miliband issued a thinly veiled attack on a Polish politician accused of anti-Semitism.
The Foreign Secretary said David Cameron's decision to support Michal Kaminski as leader of the Tories' new Euro-grouping had provoked "real cause for concern" among Britain's Jewish community. Mr Kaminski, a member of the far-right Polish Law and Justice Party, has denied claims that he opposed an apology by his countrymen in 2001 for the massacre of hundreds of Jews in Jedwabne in July 1941.
The Foreign Secretary, the son of Jewish refugees of the Holocaust, said: "David Cameron has shown little appetite for tough decisions in his career to date. On this rare occasion, he has decided to expend some serious political capital. And on what? On supporting a man like Michal Kaminski for a position of influence in the European Parliament over a moderate and loyal member of his own party.
"It has given key communities in Britain real cause for concern. Against the best advice of foreign leaders and British business, he drove the Tories out of the mainstream and into the right-wing margins of Europe. This reversion to the right-wing extremes of his own party should give people a strong sense of what both he and his party believe in, and it has nothing to do with the best interests of Britain."
Mr Kaminksi has insisted he is not anti-Semitic, and claims he has spent "a lifetime of work supporting Israel and the Jewish community in Poland".