What
is the Cause of AIDS in Zambia?: Letter to Fellow Zambians

By
Mwizenge S. Tembo style="mso-footnote-id:ftn1" title>[1], Ph. D.
Associate Prof. of Sociology

style="border:none;mso-border-alt:solid windowtext 3.0pt;
padding:0in;mso-padding-alt:1.0pt 4.0pt 1.0pt 4.0pt">The
views expressed in this communication are strictly the
author’s. They do not represent the views of ZANOBA, its
Executive or his employers. He takes full responsibility for
them. In NO way should this document be ever publicly circulated.

July 5, 2002

Dear Fellow Citizens,

I am writing this to you my fellow citizens
with a deeply troubled conscience because I have kept silent for
so long. I have come to the realization that unless we Zambians
do something ourselves, no body is going to do anything
meaningful about solving the deadly problem of AIDS. Twenty years
of research by Western medical experts about the problem has
yielded no cure or vaccine.

I want to discuss with you the crucial
subject of HIV-AIDS disease. The aim of this discussion is three
fold: First, I wish to frankly share with you my own personal
experiences and why the HIV as the only cause of AIDS hypothesis
does not make sense at all. Second, I wish to share with you some
of the known facts, possibilities and research that you will
never hear about in the popular mainstream media and why. Third,
and last, I will suggest to you what you personally can do to
halt the so-called HIV-AIDS disease and create a better and
healthy future Zambia for you, your relatives, friends, and all
the noble people of the nation of Zambia.

The problem to day is that there is so much
information overload that most of you will probably think what I
am saying is nonsense or you would rather believe the more
“reliable”, “expert” sources, or you will
tell yourself, “if he is telling the truth” we would
hear it straight from the free media. Nothing could be further
from the truth. But I beg you to bear with me and for a change
just think seriously assessing these ideas using your own
experiences as a Zambian.

Before I go on, I would like to discuss up
front my own credibility. Why am I discussing this with you? Do I
have any secret gains or hidden agenda in persuading you to
change your mind? Do I get thrills from causing trouble? Am I
qualified to discuss the issue of HIV-AIDS and to recommend
solutions?

My answers to these questions are that I am
very concerned and want to prevent any further unnecessary deaths
among Zambians, I have no secret agenda and you can choose not to
believe what I say, and I do not get any thrills from discussing
some of the things I am going to say because some of them are
very painful and humiliating. In spite all the things that I read
and I have personally observed over the last twenty years that do
not make sense, it would be so much easier to just keep quiet and
just enjoy the life that I have. But I deeply care about my
fellow citizens and humanity. I find that life is miserable
without some of the friends and relatives who would perhaps still
be here to day if HIV-AIDS had not been so seriously politicized.
But most of them are dead. There is an actual danger that any of
my close relatives and friends this minute to day could have flue
for a few weeks. If they go to a clinic anywhere in Zambia, they
could erroneously be told they have HIV-AIDS and they are going
to die.

I am very qualified to discuss the HIV-AIDS
issue because I have closely followed many technical trends in
the field since the first articles on HIV-AIDS came out in 1982
and 1983. I wrote a 24 page paper in 1999 that you can have if
you ask for it.“The Deadly Fallacy of the HIV-AIDS-Death
Hypothesis: Exposing the Epidemic that Is Not.” I have
lost many relatives and friends to the so-called HIV-AIDS disease
or “epidemic” over the last twenty years. When I was in
Zambia from 1987 to 1989, I made so many trips to Leopardshill
and Chingwere Cemeteries in Lusaka. At that time I began
to be skeptical about how HIV-AIDS was killing people because of
how some of the people had died.

Soon after I returned to the United States
in 1989, I began to read literature that was critical and opposed
the notion that HIV was the ONLY cause of AIDS and it was killing
Zambians. After careful reflection, the literature began to make
sense. The references in my paper will show you what books and
articles I have read. In addition I have kept a very close watch
on relatives and friends who have died over the years from those
who live in the city all the way to the village. I have a cousin
in the village who lost her husband to the so-called HIV-AIDS
four years ago. She had four children who are all healthy adults
now. I have a niece who lives in Chipata who is thirty-four years
old. She lost her first husband in 1986 to AIDS and the second
husband in 2000. I visited her last husband when he was admitted
at University Teaching Hospital. He looked pitifully thin and
haggard. What is very surprising is that my niece looks and is
very healthy. She has had several healthy children with both
husbands. Of course, I am humble enough to realize that I cannot
know everything. Please, do inform me if you think there is
something crucial that I am missing.

What has motivated me to write this
discussion is the death of a very close friend last September
from the so-called HIV-AIDS. But what was the last straw that
forced me to write this message was when I finally read the book
in the paper back edition: Inventing the AIDS virus by
Peter Duesberg published in 1996. I have been convinced for a
long time that all the logic and available scientific evidence
strongly suggests that HIV may NOT be the ONLY cause of AIDS.
Again, I beg you to pay attention to this important statement:
Duesberg and other dissidents are NOT denying that AIDS exists
but that the cause is likely NOT HIV only. This is very important
and is not splitting hairs or arguing against a scientific view
that all scientists already agree on. You should pay very close
attention to this statement as its importance will be made clear
soon. I hope in this discussion, fellow Zambians, that I can
convince you to begin to think differently so that we can save
Zambian lives; your life, the lives of your relatives, friends,
and the nation.

I cannot use examples and names of AIDS
illness and deaths of Zambians who were close to me because this
HIV-AIDS disease has been surrounded with assumptions, rumors and
innuendo of the shame of promiscuous sex. Therefore, it would not
be prudent for me to name names as many wives, families, and
friends of these people who supposedly died of HIV-AIDS, are
still alive sometimes twelve to fifteen years later. But I will
use my own personal experiences as an example of why the HIV-AIDS
may be misguided and may have caused many unnecessary premature
deaths of Zambians. The tragedy is that many of these deaths may
continue if you and I do not do anything.

I am almost fifty years old now. Many
Zambians my age have been the worst victims of the so-called
HIV-AIDS. But I will describe to you what may be the real cause
of AIDS in Zambia.

I went to Tamanda Primary and Chizongwe
Secondary Schools in rural Chipata from the early 1960s up
to 1971 when I graduated in Form V from Chizongwe
Secondary School. My life dramatically changed when I entered the
University of Zambia in Lusaka in 1972. The majority of my
friends and peers drank a lot of alcohol very frequently,
heavily, and practically every weekend. This was at the peak of
the Zambian prosperity. The country had over one hundred million
US dollars in foreign reserves (Hall, 1969:275). Education,
medicine, housing, transportation were all free or heavily
subsidized by the government. The cost of living was very low and
food imports were well subsidized. But the thing that stands out
in my mind to day is how much drinking we did as young people
from the age of eighteen up to thirty or more years old. I knew
very few friends who did not drink regularly.

Those people who worked drank practically
every night after work. Those of us at UNZA went to parties and
bars on Friday nights and the whole of Saturday up to often two
to three hours in the morning on Sunday. Many of us spent Sundays
nursing nasty hangovers. Most drinking was done with little or no
food in the stomach since most of us often had just enough money
to buy beer. Zambian bars rarely sold meals. Osamwina or
small pieces of roasted beef on a grill outside the bar was the
only possible food available. I remember now with sadness that
after I graduated from UNZA and got a job in 1977, at one time I
drunk at least six beers every night in bars for thirty straight
days. Illegal drugs and other stimulants were not known in Zambia
during this period.

In the late 1960s and during the entire
1970s decade, our country was so prosperous that bars were all
over the cities, rural towns, and remote roads. Bars and signs of
Chibuku Uku were scattered all over along the rural roads.
There were numerous bars lined up along Cairo Road, ChaChaCha
Road, and Freedom way in Lusaka and all major cities. For example
on the Great East Road, there were numerous bars before Chongwe.
There were bars at Rufunsa, Kacholola, Nyimba, Petauke, Katete,
and Chipata. There were many little bars in between. Many
of these bars closed and went out of business in the 1980s. Once
these bars were closed, illicit and sometimes toxic alcohols were
available especially in the cities and towns. Kachasu
distilled alcohol and Mbamba brew were common in Lusaka.
Ingredients for the illicit Mbamba, which was widely
available in shanty compounds, were believed to include
fertilizer and rat poison in order to make the beer more potent
for customers. Some illicit brews were known as
“Wayini” or wine believed to have used lots of sugar as
its main ingredient. These claims could never be verified because
the brews were illegally made in illegal settlements known as
shanty compounds. These brews were for customers who were too
poor to afford the traditional Chibuku beer or Mosi
bottle beer.

If you thought excessive alcohol consumption
was bad, the excesses of human sexuality went hand in hand with
the excessive alcohol consumption. In 1969, I remember reading in
the Zambian papers the debate about premarital sex and whether it
was acceptable for a single young woman to live by herself in a
flat or for her to live with her boyfriend before marriage. All
this debate flew out of the window by 1974. The sexual revolution
that had hit the United States in the 1960s and 70s had arrived
in Zambia with a vengeance. Young women rented their own
apartments threw traditional restraints and morals out of the
window. Young men in cars roamed the cities in bars and night
clubs in search of beer and sex. Bars, night clubs, and house
parties were filled to capacity with young men and women out for
a good time. One-night stands were extremely common for too many
men and women who could afford it.

In case this sounds too general, I will cite
two specific cases. I knew a young man who was about twenty-five
years old in 1974. He was single and had a modest one-bedroom
apartment in the Northmead area in Lusaka. He drank frequently.
In one of our casual conversations, he intimated to me that in
that one year he had sex with (85) eighty-five different women.
Of course I was skeptical coming from a rural conservative
background. But I was inclined to believe him because that one
weekend, he had slept with three different women. I even talked
to one of the women afterwards. She explained to me that she
slept with him because he had an apartment and money. While as I
would be less successful with her and her friends sexually since
I was a mere student who neither had money, an apartment, or let
alone a car. I visited that friend that one year during numerous
weekends. Each time I visited him, he had different women. Of
course as a virile young man who did not have any money and could
not afford anything, I foolishly admired this so-called fast life
or “laifi” of women, beer, and big hi-fi stereo
system.

I knew another single young man who was
twenty-seven years old who was an accountant at a bank in Lusaka.
He also had a two bedroom posh apartment with the latest hi-fi
stereo. One time, he casually complained to me that in one month,
he had slept with five different young women who worked in a
large company in Luasaka. He claimed that Venereal Diseases (VD)
or Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) were so rampant among
those women that he had to go to the hospital for antibiotics
three different times during that period of two months.

I considered myself slow, shy, and sexually
conservative compared to other young Zambians at the time. But
even my lifestyle caught up with me as a single young man with a
job and an apartment. I had a worthless one night stand with a
woman from a bar from the Great North Road in Lusaka. She left
the following morning and I never saw her again. That same day, I
came down with one of the serious venereal diseases that were
common in Lusaka at the time known as bola-bola. I immediately
went to the University Teaching Hospital. I was prescribed
tetracycline antibiotics for three months. But what struck me at
the time will become relevant to HIV-AIDS.

There was a long line to see the doctor. But
the line at the hospital pharmacy or dispensary could have been
easily almost a mile long as it snaked and meandered through the
corridors of the Lusaka’s University Teaching Hospital (UTH)
grounds. Zambia was prosperous at the time and almost every one
of the hundreds of patients was walking away with several packets
of antibiotics. No doubt others had chroloquin tablets for
malaria and other were filling various assortments of drug
prescriptions.

A friend I had known since my boarding
primary school in the 1960s worked in an office in Lusaka in the
early 1970s. He was married but drank practically every night and
some times spent nights out drinking on weekends especially when
he was paid at month ends. He told me he popped antibiotic pills
frequently before drinking to prevent him from catching any
Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) or Venereal Diseases (VD)
from the bar women with whom he had sexual intercourse. One time
he actually showed me two bright red pills that he downed with
beer at the beginning of our drinking session. When I last saw my
friend in the early 1980s, he was divorced, had custody of his
teenage daughter and had quit drinking. He looked healthy. I have
no ideas whether he is even still alive to day. When you multiply
these possible high levels of alcohol consumption and sexual
activity by a large factor of the Zambian population, you easily
get the potential for a massive public health problem that may
have produced a unique illness or epidemic after fifteen to
twenty years.

In 1977, I left Zambia and went abroad to
the United States to do my Masters degree. My drinking did not
slow down much. I met my wife, returned to Zambia and got married
in 1980. This was a significant event in my life as it meant I
had only one sexual partner during what might have been the
height of the so-called HIV-AIDS sexual transmission. You have to
remember that by this time, most young men in my age had been
drinking rather heavily and having many sexual partners for at
least ten years.

The economic situation began to deteriorate
in Zambia in the early 1980s. I was abroad again doing my Ph. D
most of the 1980s. In retrospect, I believe being married, having
children, and especially being abroad may have saved my life. By
1983, the HIV-AIDS epidemic was unveiled and exploded. I believed
it so completely that I was worried. I sent the very first AIDS
magazine article to Zambia to warn friends and relatives about
this new deadly sexually transmitted disease that had no cure. I
remembered that in 1980 in Lusaka, I had a long-decayed molar
tooth removed at a dentist who had used no gloves and used
reusable metal syringes that were only sterilized in boiling
water and methylated spirits or pure alcohol.

I returned to Zambia in 1987 and by 1988,
many friends and relatives, too many to count, began to die of
supposedly HIV-AIDS. Some complained of a headache on a Saturday
and were suddenly dead by Monday. Others were bed ridden with
malaria for months before they died. Newspapers and obituaries
simply stated that the person died after a long or short illness.
Funeral wakes and burial trips to the two cemeteries in Lusaka
were frequent. Rumors, panic, fear, assumptions, and innuendo
about AIDS were commonplace.

Virtually anybody who died after six months,
three months, or one week of illness was assumed to have died of
HIV-AIDS disease. The disgracing and shameful assumption was that
the person or their spouse was sexually promiscuous. Some of the
deaths of friends and relatives stand out.

This friend was at his prime. He was married
and had four children. He drank and everybody knew that he was a
womanizer. He looked healthy and was not the sickly type. He fell
ill on Monday. We, his close friends and fellow employees,
visited him on Wednesday morning at his house. He was sitting up
in his living room and in a surprisingly lively way described his
symptoms as fever. He had opted to go to a traditional healer in
one of the nearby compounds. He explained that he was given an
herb that made him purge to cleanse his stomach. He said he
thought he was going to be alright. By Friday that week though,
he was so sick that he was admitted at the University Teaching
Hospital (UTH). I visited him in the hospital ward on Saturday
afternoon.

The hospital ward was relatively quiet,
bright, and immaculately clean. This man who had looked
relatively healthy only Wednesday that week was fighting for his
life. His throat was almost swollen shut. He was making loud,
hissing, desperate breathing noises. Something was swollen on his
neck the size of a golf ball. Later I was to find out from his
official death certificate that this was a swollen lymph node. I
stood there by his hospital bed, stunned at the sudden turn of
events. After a while, he opened his eyes and saw me. He tried to
mouth something but nothing came out. I gestured that he
shouldn’t say anything. He continued to breath struggling at
every breath making a loud crooking sound. After a while, I took
two steps back to leave. He desperately reached his hand out to
me. I held it instinctively.

“D-o-n’t
….go……” he hoarsely hissed after breathing in
very deeply making a big effort. I felt guilty for wanting to
leave. He looked scared of being left alone. I stood there until
his wife came back from an errand. She and I exchanged some brief
words and I left.

The following day on Sunday at noon, as my
family and I were eating lunch, word came that my friend had died
the previous night. If there was anything for me that was
later to epitomize the painful tragedy that might be the botched
HIV-AIDS “diagnosis” or erroneous belief, it was this
death.

Later, a clinic attendant who knew the
deceased friend said the friend may have had a normal bacteria
infection. But he may have panicked fearing he had HIV-AIDS and
delayed getting immediate and standard antibiotic treatment. He
may have sought herbal treatment from a traditional healer (there
is nothing wrong with this) out of desperation fearing and
believing he had HIV-AIDS which had no cure in the modern
hospital.

Some potential so-called HIV-AIDS victims in
Zambia may have had either perhaps divine intervention or may
have been lucky. This author’s story is probably a prime
example. When I returned to Zambia in 1987, I was quite happy and
excited to finally return home to take up my position as Research
Fellow and Lecturer at the Institute of African Studies of the
University of Zambia. I felt very healthy and I was thirty-three
years old. By this time, I had been drinking beer for fifteen
years although now very moderately. The first change in my health
happened in September 1988. I had gone to a research field trip
in a very rural and remote province of Zambia. I drunk the water
there and mosquitoes were rampant although I had a mosquito net
over my motel bed. Could I have had malaria? I suspect I may have
contracted a stomach parasite because when I returned to Lusaka,
my stomach was very quizzy. I felt nauseous every morning. I felt
even more nauseous when I drunk just one beer. I never vomited. I
abstained from alcohol for the next three months.

At the end of January 1989, I decided to try
to drink a beer again. I felt nauseous. At this point in Zambia,
the economy had deteriorated such that my pay as a professor was
worth less than fifty US dollars per month, inflation and
unemployment were really high. Shortages of essential commodities
that had been plentiful in earlier prosperous years were wide
spread. The commodities that were scarce were sugar, cooking oil,
corn meal, bread, butter or margarine. The medical facilities
were in shambles, my son who was in second grade could not read
well enough because we could not afford to get him to a descent
school in Lusaka on my salary, my job was getting nowhere. Worst
of all, burglars were terrorizing our neighborhood at night,
presumably from the shanty compound just a stone throw from the
University residences.

One night, at about four am, my wife and I
heard commotion outside our house that woke both of us. We rushed
to our upstairs bedroom window. In the night haze and our dull
neighborhood streetlight, we heard our neighbor yell some vicious
epithets as the shadows of two men were fleeing from his house.
Our neighbor desperately fired his harmless bb gun or bird pellet
pistol to scare them. The suspected burglars stopped briefly and
then left as our neighbor retreated into his house securing the
front gate again and making sure everything was all right. The
burglars had broken the thin chain that secured his house gate.
The following morning, we visited out neighbor. The thieves had
smashed the bottom corner of the living room window glass. They
were after his stereo and TV. For the next three nights, my wife
and I did not sleep at all because we were so scared we would be
the next victims of the night robbers. On the fourth day, we both
had symptoms of fever and body aches. We assumed we had malaria.
We went to the clinic and were tested. The malaria tests came
back negative. The extreme stress with sleepless nights and worry
may have induced the symptoms of the illness without having any
germs in our body. Discussing why psychological factors may cause
disease or immune problems, Maggiore says: “Chronic anxiety,
panic, stress and depression have been shown to compromise
health, damage immune function, and result in symptoms identical
to AIDS.” (2000:53). My wife and I immediately got two dogs
for security and we slept well at night. After two days, our
symptoms of illness disappeared.

In the neighborhood we lived in, there was
no water all day. The water flowed through the faucets only late
at night most days. This meant waking up every night to fill up
buckets with fresh water. There was an accident at the Kafue
Gorge hydroelectric station. So we did not have much electricity
during the night. We cooked on a charcoal brazier and used
kerosene lamps and candles for light many evenings. All of this
is to demonstrate to you that I was under tremendous emotional
stress and pressure. How many Zambians continue to experience and
endure some of these same pressures to day as you read this?

One morning in February 1989, I went to Long
Acres ZCBC state shop because I had heard rumors that they had
sugar. As usual, there was a line of people that snaked and
meandered through the store to the outside back alley of the
building. I knew that many people had made an occupation of
standing in lines all day, buying large quantities of the scarce
commodities, and later selling them in smaller quantities on the
black market for more than three times the shop prices. I marched
right to the front to the manager and asked politely that I buy
one packet of sugar. The young man was polite and told me to go
to the back of the line outside. I told him I had to rush back to
work and could not afford to stand in line all day. He replied
that there was nothing he could do. I had had it and lost my
temper. I became very angry.

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