The American Spectator
April 2000

Capitol Ideas column
by Tom Bethell

Capitol Ideas: INVENTING AN EPIDEMIC. The traditional diseases of Africa
are called AIDS.

Hype about AIDS in Africa has reached new heights. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright and Vice President Al Gore (at the U.N. Security
Council) have declared it to be an international security threat-as grave
as warfare. AIDS is now called the leading cause of death in Africa, with
over two million deaths last year, and the epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa
is spreading "nearly unabated." Seventy percent of all AIDS cases are
said to be African. On Newsweek's cover we read of "10 Million Orphans."
Meanwhile, in a "Tour of Light," a troupe of orphans from "devastated
Uganda" performs on the Kennedy Center stage. There are calls for a new
Marshall Plan.

Skepticism about what governments say-always scarce among
journalists-vanishes completely when it comes to "plagues" and epidemics.
At the mention of AIDS, newspaper stories are virtually dictated by
public health officials. The New York Times is the pre-eminent example,
with other publications trotting behind uncritically. A rare exception is
the science journalist Michael Fumento, now with the Hudson Institute.
Another is Charles Geshekter, a professor of African history at
California State University at Chico. He has made 15 trips to Africa and
has written widely about AIDS in that continent.

The author of The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, Fumento told me that he
found the recent reports of HIV infection rates of 25 percent in some
African countries to be not believable. The alarmist predictions about
the progress of AIDS in this country have not been borne out, he said.
African AIDS is an attempt to find the bad news elsewhere. Here, AIDS has
not spread into the general population, and never will. It has remained
confined to the major "risk groups," mainly intravenous drug users and
fast-lane homosexuals. But in Africa, more women than men are said to be
infected with the virus. Prof. Geshekter, too, sees African AIDS as a
prolongation of the gravy train for public health experts. "AIDS is
dwindling away in this country," he told me. The numbers are down. What
are the AIDS educators to do? Africa beckons."

Here is an "African AIDS" primer. Over the years AIDS American-style was
redefined more and more expansively. In 1993, for example, the Centers
for Disease Control in Atlanta added cervical cancer to the list of
AIDS-defining diseases, with the unacknowledged goal of increasing the
numbers of women. The overwhelming preponderance of males was an
embarrassment to infectious-disease epidemiology, given that the viral
agent was supposed to be sexually transmitted. AIDS is a name for 30-odd
diseases found in conjunction with a positive test for antibodies to the
human immunodeficiency virus. Being "HIV positive," then, is the unifying
requirement for an AIDS case. Here is the key point that the newspapers
won't tell you. To diagnose AIDS in Africa, no HIV test is needed. The
presence of the unifying agent that supposedly causes the immune
deficiency, the ID of AIDS, does not have to be established.

This was decided by public health officials at an AIDS conference in
Bangui, a city in the Central African Republic, in October 1985. This
meeting was engineered by an official from the CDC, Joseph McCormick. He
wanted to establish a diagnostic definition of AIDS to be used in poor
countries that lacked the equipment to do blood tests. He also succeeded
in persuading representatives from the World Health Organization in
Geneva to set up its own AIDS program. The appearance of sick people in
Zaire hospitals had persuaded McCormick and others that AIDS now existed
in Africa-this before HIV tests had even been conducted. And here was
something important to write home about: slightly more women than men
were affected. Back in America, as Laurie Garrett wrote in The Coming
Plague (1994), McCormick told an assistant secretary of Health and Human
Services that "there's a one to one sex ratio of AIDS cases in Zaire."
Heterosexual transmission had been established. Now we were all at risk!
AIDS budgets would soar.

The CDC had an "urgent need to begin to estimate the size of the AIDS
problem in Africa," McCormick wrote in his book, Level 4: Virus Hunters
of the CDC. "Only then could we figure out what needed to be done-and
where. This is what is known as surveillance. It involves counting the
number of cases of AIDS. But we had a peculiar problem with AIDS. Few
AIDS cases in Africa receive any medical attention at all. No diagnostic
tests, suited to widespread use, yet existed . . . We needed a clinical
case definition-that is to say, a set of guidelines a clinician could
follow in order to decide whether a certain person had AIDS or not. This
was my major goal: if I could get everyone at the WHO meeting in Bangui
to agree on a single, simple definition of what an AIDS case was in
Africa, then, imperfect as the definition might be, we could actually
start to count the cases, and we would all be counting roughly the same
thing."

His goal was achieved. The "Bangui definition," was reached "by
consensus." It has proven useful, McCormick added, "in determining the
extent of the AIDS pandemic in Africa, especially in areas where no
testing is available." Here are the major components of the definition:
"prolonged fevers (for a month or more), weight loss of 10 percent or
greater, and prolonged diarrhea." No HIV test, of course. What this meant
was that many traditional African diseases, pandemic in poverty stricken
areas with tropical climate, open latrines and contaminated drinking
water, could now be called something else with no fear of contradiction:
AIDS.

The Bangui redefinition was published in CDC's Morbidity and Mortality
Weekly Report, and in Science magazine (21 November 1986), but you would
be hard put to find it in our major newspapers. Take the New York Times,
whose main AIDS reporter has long been Lawrence K. Altman. He is himself
a former public health officer, and like McCormick worked for the CDC's
Epidemic Intelligence Service. He wrote the first newspaper article on
AIDS, in 1981, and in November 1985 wrote two huge stories for the Times
on African AIDS. "To this reporter," he wrote in the first, "who is also
a physician and who has examined AIDS patients and interviewed dozens of
doctors while traveling through Africa, the disease is clearly a more
important public health problem than many African governments
acknowledge." The story filled an entire inside page of the paper, and it
included a "box" on the Bangui meeting. It mentioned a "hospital
surveillance system to determine the extent of AIDS," but Dr. Altman
omitted to say that, in Africa, AIDS could now be diagnosed without an
HIV test. [Phone calls were made to Lawrence Altman at the New York
Times, and a message was left on his machine, but he did not call back.]

The obvious problem was pointed out by Charles Gilks in the British
Medical Journal in 1991. Persistent diarrhea with weight loss can be
associated with "ordinary enteric parasites and bacteria," as well as
with opportunistic infection, he wrote. "In countries where the incidence
of tuberculosis is high," as it is in Africa, "substantial numbers of
people reported as having AIDS may in fact not have AIDS." By then, the
Times had published another huge series on African AIDS, this one
reported by Eric Eckholm and John Tierney. It emphasized the need for
condom distribution in Africa ("since 1968, A.I.D. has given 7 billion
condoms to developing countries,") but the reporters again overlooked the
relaxed definition. The same was true of the Times's more recent series,
"Dead Zones."

Unlike dysentery and malaria, of course, plagues and epidemics reward
reporters with front-page stories. And the budget requests of public
health departments are met with alacrity. It was mutually convenient,
surely, even if coincidental, that Altman and McCormick emerged from the
same CDC intelligence service.

The loose definition has allowed health officials to conduct small
surveys and make sweeping extrapolations to entire nations: AIDS is
running rampant! Ten million orphans! (Newsweek might have told us that,
in WHO lingo, an "orphan" is someone under fifteen whose mother has died.
With life expectancy short, and fertility rates high, it is to be
expected that a lot of African children are still under 15 when their
mother dies.)

In a forthcoming article for Philanthropy, Michael Fumento comments on
the vagueness of the Third World AIDS estimates, "made by organizations
that are given more funds if they declare there's more AIDS." He adds:
"The Statistical Assessment Service [STATS] in Washington D.C. has noted
recently that the World Health Organization in its latest ranking of the
world's greatest killers dropped TB down the list while moving AIDS up.
The best explanation, STATS director of research David Murray told me, is
that WHO noted that many Third World AIDS victims also suffer from TB,
that both AIDS and TB data are just educated guesses, and so felt
justified in simply shifting a huge chunk of deaths out of the TB
category into AIDS. He was unable to get anyone from the organization to
comment."

That surely is what happened. The CDC added TB to its list of
AIDS-defining diseases in 1993, and, with no need for an HIV test in
Africa, TB falls under the "AIDS" umbrella. All along, incidentally,
someone has been keeping a stricter tally of the AIDS cases actually
reported to the WHO. The organization's Weekly Epidemiological Record
(Nov. 26, 1999), states that a cumulative total of 794,444 cases of AIDS
in Africa has been reported to Geneva since 1982. "Anyone who wants to
disprove those numbers should provide better, locally based figures,"
says Charles Geshekter of Cal State University. "So far, no one has."

In South Africa, which he visited recently, Geshekter found that HIV
tests are conducted at pre-natal clinics and the results extrapolated
across the country. One problem is that pregnancy is only one of the many
conditions that trigger a "false positive result." The reaction is not
specific to HIV. Antibodies to many other endemic infections also trigger
false HIV alarms. The problem has been well known for 15 years and it
alone renders all African AIDS projections meaningless.

 Yes, people are dying all over Africa. The continent's population,
whether sub-Saharan or supra-, continues to climb rapidly all the same.
People are not dying of AIDS but of the diseases that have always
afflicted those parts of the globe where the water is not clean and
sewage is not properly disposed of. Poverty, unclean water and tropical
weather make for insalubrious conditions. They have been exacerbated by
civil war and the vast conflict raging in and around Central Africa.
During his recent visit, Prof. Geshekter asked a woman from a rural Zulu
township what made her neighbors sick. She mentioned tuberculosis and the
open latrine pits next to village homes. "The flies, not sex, cause
'running tummy'," she said. Her understanding of public health would seem
to be more advanced than that of the highly paid health officers who fly
in from Atlanta and Geneva.

 A sub-Saharan male-and-female AIDS epidemic implies that Africans have
abandoned themselves to reckless sexual promiscuity. Recreational drug
use is not alleged, and it is well established that it takes a thousand
sexual contacts on average to transmit HIV heterosexually. (That is why
HIV has stayed confined to risk groups in the West). Fables of insatiable
African truck-drivers and rampant prostitution-Beverly Hills morals
imputed to African villagers-are attempts to rationalize the equal-gender
epidemiology of AIDS in Africa. Moslem countries to the north are less
likely to accept this libel, so we may predict that the "epidemic" will
remain firmly sub-Saharan. Cairo is a river's journey away from the
Uganda hotbeds, and yet WHO reports a demure cumulative total of 215
cases in Egypt (pop. 65 million) since AIDS began.

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