Painful Retrospectives

Posted on 1/24/2005 by Curzon

C-Span’s Booknotes has finally ended after fifteen years of in-depth author interviews. It will be sorely, sorely missed. But on the bright side, all of their programs are archived on line, all of which have transcripts and many of which you can listen to and watch with real player.

It’s funny to go back and see what people were reading and writing back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some authors who I’ve never heard of appear very presient in hindsight. Judy Shelton, who wrote The Coming Soviet Crash in 1989, looks really good in retrospect. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.‘s The Conservative Crack-Up, published half a year before Clinton’s reelection, also looks impressive. But at the same time, a lot of people look damn foolish. Stratfor’s George Friedman, for example, wrote The Coming War With Japan in 1991 and now looks like a right nitwit. And particularly terrifying is Michael Fumento‘s The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS , published in 1990. Check out this segment from the transcript:

FUMENTO: The thesis is not that heterosexuals don’t get AIDS — of course they do. They get it from needle-sharing, primarily. They used to get it from hemophiliac clotting factor. They used to get it from blood transfusions. They get it from having sex with people in those categories and with bisexuals. The myth is that this is a disease that is going epidemiologically from hetero to hetero to hetero, that it has broken out into the hetero ranks, that it will break out in the hetero ranks. We had enough data pretty much to refute that a couple of years ago, and that by 1990, it’s quite solid.

Yeah, right. Fumento’s accompanying thesis on the media’s ability to terrify the public is important, but heterosexual AIDS is not a myth. Just look at sub-saharan Africa, where HIV infection rates are over 50% in many countries. Terrifying… and certainly no myth.

About Curzon

Lord George Nathaniel Curzon (1859 - 1925) entered the British House of Commons as a Conservative MP in 1886, where he served as undersecretary of India and Foreign Affairs. He was appointed Viceroy of India at the turn of the 20th century where he delineated the North West Frontier Province, ordered a military expedition to Tibet, and unsuccessfully tried to partition the province of Bengal during his six-year tenure. Curzon served as Leader of the House of Lords in Prime Minister Lloyd George's War Cabinet and became Foreign Secretary in January 1919, where his most famous act was the drawing of the Curzon Line between a new Polish state and Russia. His publications include Russia in Central Asia (1889) and Persia and the Persian Question (1892). In real life, "Curzon" is a US citizen from the East Coast who has been a financial analyst, freelance translator, and university professor; he is currently on assignment in Tokyo.
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9 Responses to Painful Retrospectives

  1. ZAR says:
    1/25/2005 at 1:32 am

    Yes, indeed, look at Sub-Saharan Africa! Oh, and while you are at it, why not take a look at some of the more advanced countries of the Dark Continent, such as South Africa and Tanzania, where you would assume statistics and testing would be more reliable, right?

    Wrong. It is common knowledge that more Africans have AIDS, simply because testing methods are less stringent (read: a lot less stringent) than in the West.

    I quote from http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/rmafrica.htm comparing the testing process of AIDS in the United States to South Africa, for example. In other, poorer parts of the Dark Continent, I am sure that the situation is even worse.

    In many ways, the story of AIDS in Africa is a story of the gulf between rich and poor, the privileged and the wretched. Here is one way of calibrating the abyss.

    Let’s say you live in America, and you committed an indiscretion with drugs and needles or unprotected sex a few years back, and now find yourself plagued by ominous maladies that won’t go away. Your doctor frowns and says you should have an AIDS test. She draws a blood sample and sends it to a laboratory, where it is subjected to an exploratory ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) test. The ELISA cannot detect the virus itself, only the antibodies that mark its presence. If your blood contains such antibodies, the test will “light up,” or change color, whereupon the lab tech will repeat the experiment. If the second ELISA lights up, too, he’ll do a confirmatory test using the more sophisticated and expensive Western Blot method. And if that confirms the infection, the Centers for Disease Control recommends that the entire procedure be repeated using a new blood sample, to put the outcome beyond all doubt.

    In other words, we’re talking six tests in all, doubly confirmed. Such a protocol is probably foolproof, but as you draw away from the First World, health-care standards decline and people grow poorer, meaning that confirmatory tests become prohibitively expensive. In Johannesburg, for instance, a doctor in private practice will typically want three consecutive positive ELISAs before deciding that you are HIV-positive. But his counterpart in a government-sponsored testing center has to settle for two ELISA tests.

    In the annual pregnancy-clinic surveys on which South Africa’s terrifying AIDS statistics are based, the protocol is one ELISA only, unconfirmed by anything. In America one ELISA means almost nothing. “Persons are positive only when they are repeatedly reactive by ELISA and confirmed by Western Blot,” says the CDC. The companies that manufacture ELISAs agree: The tests must be confirmed by other means. “Repeatedly reactive specimens may contain antibodies” to HIV, one firm’s literature says, “Therefore additional, more specific tests must be run to verify a positive result.”

    In parts of Africa, however, at least for the purpose of data-gathering, such precautions are deemed unnecessary. That’s partly because the World Health Organization itself actually evaluates commercial HIV tests as they come on the market. In these trials, new tests are measured against a panel of several hundred blood samples from all over the world. Some of the samples are HIV-positive, some are not. The ELISAs are tested to make sure they can tell which are which. Among the scores of brands evaluated throughout the years, a handful have proved to be useless. But those manufactured by established biotechnology corporations usually pass with flying colors, typically scoring accuracy rates close to perfect.

    Don’t you not find it strange that there is no world wide accepted standardised AIDS test? Oh, and remember, having lots of people with the disease is good for business, especially in poor African countries:

    …if a government found any evidence of too many false positives in their testing, they would report it. Governments would like to find evidence of a lower prevalence, as would we all, and since they have the data to easily check your hypothesis, they would do so and report it.”

    But would they? High AIDS numbers are not entirely undesirable in poverty-stricken African countries. High numbers mean deepening crisis, and crisis typically generates cash. The results are now manifest: planeloads of safari scientists flying in to oversee research projects or cutting-edge interventions, and bringing with them huge inflows of foreign currency – about $1 billion a year in AIDS-related funding, and most of it destined for the countries with the highest numbers of infected citizens.

    On the ground, these dollars translate into patronage for politicians and good jobs for their struggling constituents. In Uganda, an AIDS councelor earns twenty times more than a schoolteacher. In Tanzania. AIDS doctors can increase their income just by saving the hard-currency per diums they earn while attending international conferences. Here in South Africa, entrepreneurs are piling into the AIDS business at an astonishing rate, setting up consultancies, selling herbal immune boosters and vitamin supplements, devising new insurance products, distributing condoms, staging benefits, forming theater troupes that take the AIDS prevention message into schools. A friend of mine is co-producing a slew of TV documentaries about AIDS, all for foreign markets. Another friend has got his fingers crossed, since his agency is on the shortlist to land a $6 million safe-sex ad campaign.

    Yes, my friends. It is simply politics, money and statistics. Not a very good mixture, either way you consider it.

    ZAR

  2. Saru says:
    1/25/2005 at 3:32 am

    Gee, lemme take a guess who THAT comment was from… ;)

    If you think that’s scary, check out these guys:

    http://www.flat-earth.org/society/about.html

  3. Curzon says:
    1/25/2005 at 3:42 am

    You realize you’re about to start a war, right?

  5. Mutantfrog says:
    1/25/2005 at 5:44 pm

    Oh god, not this again!

    Too bad about Booknotes anyway, that was a good show. Maybe after the cancellation of Crossfire cable TV needed to lose something good to balance out the karma.

  6. Michael Fumento says:
    1/25/2005 at 6:54 pm

    Why would you post a piece of my transcript and not bother to read it? I set out a thesis in 1990 (originally 1997 actually) that AIDS would never do in the First World countries what the media were claiming it was already doing. I was right; everyone else was wrong. That I distinguished the Africa pattern is pretty clear from my having a chapter titled “But What about Africa?” But apparently you didn’t think your readers needed to know about that.

  7. Curzon says:
    1/25/2005 at 7:42 pm

    No bad faith intended — there was no mention of the Africa chapter in the transcript, and I haven’t read the book. I do see your point on the nature of the media, duely noted in the post. That AIDS will not become an epidemic in a country such as ours where casual heterosexual contact is not uncommon does not seem to me to be a myth — the HIV infection rate does grow every year. Compare 581,429 cases in 1996 to an estimated 850,000 in 2003.

  8. Michael Fumento says:
    1/26/2005 at 8:00 pm

    But again, you miss the point. Are we having more “casual heterosexual contact”Â? now than in 1975 or 1980 or 1985 or 1990? And yet, hetero cases as a percentage of the U.S. population remain the same. You should be looking at hetero cases year-to-year; instead you’re looking at cumulative cases from all forms of transmission. All the data you need are right here:

    http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/stats/hasr1402.htm

  9. Susan R. says:
    1/10/2006 at 7:59 am

    Of course the book of Michael Fumento’s the Myth of Heterosexual AIDS , published in 1990was very best book in which he was rejected by several publishers, not because there was a basic disagreement with the facts, but because, as one editor put it, “I’m not convinced that the argument or the cause of curing AIDS for those who have it or are afraid to have it is best served by publishing this in book form.”