CRY, BELOVED COUNTRY
How Africa Became the Victim of a Non-Existent Epidemic of HIV/AIDS

By Neville Hodgkinson

AIDS; Virus or Drug Induced?

Global Retreat Centre, Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, Oxford,
UK

It has become increasingly clear during the 1990's that in prosperous,
developed countries, AIDS is remaining almost exclusively confined to
people with clearly defined risks to their immune system regardless of
HIV. These risks include heavy drug use, promiscuous receptive anal
intercourse, or, as with the injections given to patients with haemophilia
before the arrival of high purity Factor 8, repeated exposure to other
people's blood. In Britain, out of a cumulative total of 6929 cases of
AIDS in the first ten years of the epidemic, only 63 were in heterosexuals
who were not obvious members of one of the known risk groups. In the
United States, a 1992 National Research Council report found that many
geographical areas and population groups were virtually untouched by AIDS,
and would probably remain so.

These facts do not fit the theory that the world is in the grip of a
deadly new infectious disease, putting at risk almost all sexually active
people. However, that theory appeared to gain support from reports that
millions of Africans are HIV-infected, and that hundreds of thousands are
dying from the disease, with men and women equally at risk. What is
happening to Africa today, it was argued, should serve as a warning of
what may happen to the rest of the world tomorrow, even if it takes longer
than had been expected.

In March, 1993, a television documentary was shown in Britain which
challenged the by now conventional view of Africa as a land devastated by
AIDS. It was based on a two-month investigation in Uganda and the Ivory
Coast, and was made by Meditel, an independent company that had previously
aired the views of scientists who argue HIV is not the cause of AIDS. It
concluded that Africa was not in the grip of an AIDS epidemic, but that
panic over the disease was leading to a tragic diversion of resources from
genuine medical needs.

The film crew were accompanied during their inquiries by Dr. Harvey Bialy,
a scientist with long experience of Africa, whom I interviewed at the time
for an article in The Sunday Times. He had concluded there was 'absolutely
no believable, persuasive evidence that Africa is in the midst of a new
epidemic of infectious immuno-deficiency'. But because international funds
were available for AIDS and HIV work, politicians and health workers had
an incentive to classify traditional African diseases as AIDS. The problem
was compounded by the fact that HIV testing was frequently misleading in
Africa, as the tests reacted to antibodies to other diseases, producing
high rates of false positives.

Bialy, a microbiologist working as research editor of Bio/Technology
magazine, has been visiting Africa since 1975, and has spent a total of
eight years working there. On the face of it, this gave him considerably
more authority than the large numbers of western scientists and other
workers whose first exposure to the continent was brought about by AIDS.

He was angry that so many damaging claims had been made about AIDS in
Africa on the basis of so little science. 'The only utterly new phenomenon
I have seen is in the drug-abusing prostitutes in Abidjan in the Ivory
Coast', he told me. 'These girls come from Ghana, from families of
prostitutes who are brought in by the busload. They have been doing this
for generations, and never became sick until now. What is new is that
these girls are addicted to viciously adulterated, smokeable heroin and
cocaine. It completely destroys them. They look exactly like the
inner-city crack-addicted prostitutes of the United States.'

'Otherwise, I have seen malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhoeal diseases, which
arguably have got more severe; but by all the laws of scientific reasoning
this is caused by the general economic decline in these countries, the
decline of health care and the development of drug-resistant strains. All
these things can explain exactly what is going on much more efficiently
and persuasively, and to much greater good for the public health, than
saying the diseases are being made worse by HIV'.

Our four-column story about these and other doubts, headlined 'Epidemic of
AIDS in Africa 'a tragic myth', brought a crop of contrary assertions, but
no evidence in rebuttal. My confidence in the story was further boosted by
an astonishing statement Bialy had made about the HIV test.

Bio/Technology had a paper in press, he told me, which did more than
highlight a problem with false positives: it challenged the very basis of
the test as indicating the presence of a specific virus, arguing that it
had never been validated against the accepted 'gold standard' for a
diagnostic test, isolation of the virus itself.

I found this hard to take in, and did not pursue the story further
immediately. But over subsequent weeks, I studied the paper concerned and
corresponded with the main author, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a
biophysicist at the Royal Perth Hospital. To my continuing astonishment I
found that there was indeed a mass of evidence, pulled together in
Eleopulos's enormous review article, that what had come to be called 'the
AIDS test' was scientifically invalid. The proteins detected by the test
kits were not specific to a unique retrovirus. Positive results were
produced in people whose immune systems had been activated by a wide
variety of conditions, including tuberculosis, multiple sclerosis,
malaria, malnutrition, and even a course of flu jabs. Patients with AIDS,
and promiscuous gay men leading lives likely to expose their immune
systems to multiple challenges, were certainly much more likely to test
positive than healthy Americans, but for reasons that need not have
anything to do with a deadly new virus.

The possible implications of the Bio/Technology article for an
understanding of AIDS in Africa were clearly enormous. African countries
were those where the tests might be at their most meaningless, because of
the widespread ill-health caused by malnutrition and associated chronic
diseases. Had an entire continent been panicked by western scientists into
believing it was in the grip of a deadly epidemic, on the basis of a test
that had never been shown to be valid for the retrovirus whose presence it
was claimed to detect?

I faxed the article to four virus experts in case some glaring error
invalidating its reasoning had been missed by Bio/Technology. One did not
reply, and another preferred not to comment. A third, Dr. Philip Mortimer,
of the Virus Reference Division at Britain's Central Public Health
Laboratory, wrote a courteous reply acknowledging that the article 'does
make some fair points about the weakness of the western blot test when it
is used incautiously and without follow­up'. He added, however, that 'the
situation it describes is not typical of this country where initial
positive serological (antibody) screening tests are confirmed by (i)
further investigations, usually a combination of different ELISA assays
but sometimes including Western Blot and (ii) a test of a follow­up
specimen. Only if the positive reactions on both specimens are confirmed,
usually in a reference laboratory, is a positive report issued'. Perhaps
this more stringent procedure helped to explain why Britain had only some
23 000 seropositive people, compared with an estimated 1 million in the
United States and multi­millions in Africa. But Eleopulos et al. had not
just criticised the Western Blot test. They had cited evidence indicating
that the ELISA test might be equally meaningless. In Russia in 1990, for
example, out of 20 000 positive screening tests, only 112 were confirmed
using western blot. A similar study in 1991 confirmed only 66 out of
approximately 30 000 positive test results. Clearly, by using multiple
tests giving very different results, false positives would be greatly
reduced. But this still did not answer Eleopulos's charge that there was
nothing in the literature to indicate why any of the tests should be
considered reliable as indicating the presence of a specific retrovirus.
Besides, even if the damage done by false positives was being reduced in
the UK by repeated testing, that was no comfort with regard to the
situation in Africa, where because of cost considerations, most HIV
diagnoses were being made on the basis of a single test.

Dr. Mortimer also commented that diagnostic capability had recently been
advanced by the introduction of a commercial polymerase chain reaction
assay for detecting minute quantities of HIV genetic material.

'Comparison of results using this procedure with those obtained by
antibody tests show a very close correlation confirming the reliability of
HIV antibody tests', he wrote. However, as the Bio/Technology paper
pointed out, this correlation might be the result of some quite different
cause common to both the PCR test and the antibody test. PCR signalled the
presence of only a small stretch of genetic material; perhaps it was
picking up the presence of a sequence made detectable by the same stimulus
as that which caused a person to test antibody­positive, a stimulus which
need not have anything to do with 'HIV'. The Bio/Technology paper cited
evidence in support of this idea. For example, a positive PCR reverted to
negative when exposure to risk factors was discontinued; and monocytes
from HIV­positive patients in which no HIV DNA could be detected, even by
PCR, became positive for HIV RNA after immune activation by co­cultivation
with activated T­cells.

The fourth virus expert was Professor Robin Weiss, head of the Chester
Beatty Laboratories at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, who with
Dr. Richard Tedder, a virologist at the Middlesex Hospital in London,
developed and patented Britain's first HIV test in conjunction with the
Wellcome drug company. Dr. Weiss took the trouble to write a two­page
letter concerning the Bio/Technology paper. His tone was set in the first
paragraph: 'It is the sort of paper I would have stopped reading by
paragraph 5 if you hadn't requested an opinion'. Later, he commented:
'Sorry, if the authors were my students, I'd mark this essay B­minus. Of
the 1000 or so papers on HIV/AIDS that must have been published in the
last six months, I'd put this in the bottom 10% for being worth
reporting'. He acknowledged that the paper might have had some merit if it
had been published around 1986/7, as 'there were serious difficulties and
much variation in assessing Western Blot data, and some of the ELISA tests
were still giving false positives'. But since then, he argued, the tests
had been greatly improved because they used HIV antigens produced in
bacteria by recombinant DNA technology, rather than grown from sera taken
from AIDS patients.

It seemed to me that he had not answered the central complaint, that no
one had ever established that the proteins held to indicate the active
presence of HIV really are related to the virus in people who test
positive, as opposed to other possibilities raised by the Bio/Technology
authors. I wrote back along those lines. Robin Weiss responded with a
short, unreferenced assertion: 'As I wrote, that might have been a valid
argument six years ago, but not today as the proteins have been specific
for some years'.

On August 1, 1993, the Editor ran our most challenging story to date
across the top of the front page. The headline read: 'New Doubts Over AIDS
Infections As HIV Test Declared Invalid'. The story began:

The 'AIDS test' is scientifically invalid and incapable of determining
whether people are really infected with HIV, according to a new report by
a team of Australian scientists who have conducted the first extensive
review of research surrounding the test.

Doctors should think again about its use, say the authors. 'A positive HIV
status has such profound implications that nobody should be required to
bear this burden without solid guarantees of the verity of the test and
its interpretation', they conclude. The findings, likely to cause intense
debate in the medical fraternity and anguish for many HIV­positive people,
are contained in an article published by the respected science journal,
Bio/Technology. Many people who appear to be infected by HIV, say the
researchers, can be suffering from other conditions such as malaria or
malnutrition that produce a positive result in the test. Even flu jabs can
produce the same effect. As a result, predictions by the World Health
Organisation that millions are set to die because of being HIV­positive
may be wildly inaccurate. The paper also lends powerful support to the
theory, held by growing numbers of scientists, that HIV is not the true
cause of AIDS. One of its authors, Eleni Eleopulous, a biophysicist at the
Royal Perth Hospital, said this weekend: 'There is no proof that people
labelled as 'HIV­positive' are infected with such a retrovirus. We should
really question the role of HIV in the causation of AIDS.'

The claims were so at odds with conventional thinking on this enormously
important subject that I had been nervous of writing the article, having
already had to cope with huge waves of fierce criticism and comment in
relation to previous articles questioning the HIV theory of AIDS. But this
time, there was hardly a word of protest, let alone any arguments of
rebuttal. No scientific papers to validate the tests. And no comment
elsewhere in the media. We were being privately 'rubbished' by the AIDS
experts to whom specialist writers turn in such cases. But it seemed their
case was too weak for them to wish to state it publicly.

This gave me the push I needed to undertake a venture that the Editor had
long since approved, namely, to mount our own investigation of AIDS in
Africa. Was the situation as described by Harvey Bialy in Uganda and Ivory
Coast also true of other central African countries? On August 18, armed
with the Bio/Technology paper, I flew to Nairobi, Kenya and began to make
inquiries.

It soon became clear to me that because of the idea that HIV was lethal
and rampant, there was a consensus belief that one could hardly be too
alarmist in public pronouncements about Aids. The Kenya Times, for
example, earlier that year had reported estimates by the Kenya Medical
Research Institute (KEMRI) that the country had about 100 000 AIDS cases,
and about one million people 'who have the AIDS­causing virus'. It added
that 'once a person is infected with the killer disease, his next step is
definitely death'. But the figures were impressionistic. They were put out
by researchers who had been alarmed to find that about half of the people
going to various hospitals for general medical reasons were testing
positive. Perhaps the whole edifice of fear and concern sprang from a
scientifically unvalidated test, and a misinterpretation of the meaning of
a positive test result.

According to KEMRI's Dr George Gachihi, 'when you see a young man or woman
die after a short illness, chances are that he succumbed to the AIDS
disease'. It was that perspective which led the Kenya Times to report that
'thousands of Kenyans die each year from AIDS, though the certificates
always indicate that they died from other causes'. When one looked at the
figures through the perspective of the Bio/Technology critique, however,
there was no longer any need to see the deaths as other than from the
stated causes. Similarly, despite stories about hospitals being filled to
overflowing with AIDS victims, when I visited the huge Kenyatta National
Hospital in Nairobi I found that although there was immense overcrowding,
only a handful of patients had been admitted with an AIDS diagnosis.

I also found that political factors were playing a part. Kenya had lost an
estimated $300 m in desperately needed foreign currency in November 1991,
when the industrialized world tried to force political and economic reform
on the country by cutting aid. A recent crisis announcement on AIDS by the
country's health minister was seen within the international aid community
as an attempt to win back donor sympathy and funds, according to the
journal Africa Confidential. 'A far­from­veiled theory in circulation says
figures which show AIDS spiralling out of control have been massaged to
extract sympathy', the journal said.

'In stark contrast to the recent past, when AIDS was a banned subject to
protect the tourist industry, the press has started reporting ever more
startling increases in AIDS cases and newspapers are competing for horror
stories of AIDS deaths'.

It did seem to be true that doctors were reporting growing numbers of AIDS
cases, especially among prostitutes. But in this latter group, the actual
cause of death was often unknown. When a prostitute who had tested
HIV­positive subsequently disappeared, it was assumed that she had gone
back to her home town to die of AIDS. I also found that researchers knew
nothing of the doubts over the HIV test, and had not established the
extent to which the increase in cases of immune system dysfunction was
genuinely the result of a new virus, as opposed to a consequence of an
intensification in long­established threats to health. According to some
observers, poverty had driven millions of women into prostitution, and
young African males had also been drawn into the trade.

There was nothing to support the apocalyptic vision of Africa's future
espoused by the World Health Organisation on the basis of its HIV
statistics. I found in Kenya as elsewhere that the statistics were often
based on small clinical surveys, with the results then writ large by
computer to form an estimate for the country as a whole ­ and all this
using a test which the Bio/Technology paper had shown to be unvalidated
and probably invalid. One WHO official told me: 'AIDS is there. No doubt
about it. And it is widespread and increasing. My colleagues in the other
countries can tell you the same'. But she added frankly: 'If you come with
this postulate that there are a lot of false HIV­positives, it is very
difficult to tell'.

The first story I filed back to The Sunday Times focused on the experience
of a remarkable doctor whom I met in Nairobi, Father Angelo D'Agostino.
Then aged 67, he was a former surgeon who trained as a Jesuit priest and
became a professor of psychiatry in Washington before going to Africa ten
years previously. In 1992 he had founded Nyumbani, a hospice for abandoned
and orphaned HIV­positive children, after finding that because of the
panic over AIDS, nowhere else would take them in. Regardless of HIV, there
were good reasons why the foundlings, whose plight he learned of through
work with a local Barnardo's home, should often perish. Abandoned by their
shocked and stigmatised HIV­positive mothers, the children died of
multiple infections, malnutrition, and misery.

'People think a positive test means no hope, so the children are relegated
to the back wards of hospitals which have no resources, and they die',
D'Agostino said. 'They are very sick when they come to us. Usually they
are depressed, withdrawn, and silent. Some have been in very poor
conditions. But as a result of their care here, they put on weight,
recover from their infections, and thrive. Hygiene is excellent, that they
wouldn't have in the slums they have usually been living in. Nutrition is
very good: they get vitamin supplements, cod liver oil, greens every day,
plenty of protein. They are really flourishing. Even one that came in with
TB is doing better now'.

A year on from opening the hospice, D'Agostino was puzzled. Elsewhere in
Kenya and across sub­Saharan Africa, according to WHO, tens of thousands
of children were dying because of HIV, usually in their first year. But
most of the Nyumbani babies were thriving, as I knew from spending a
couple of hours there with several of them crawling all over me. Only one
of the first 45 children had been lost ­ a six­week­old who was so sick
when she came that she had to go to hospital almost immediately, and died
two weeks later.

In an extensive interview, D'Agostino told me: 'I'm a physician, and I
bought the theory that HIV is the cause of AIDS. But there are not a lot
of things I would die for, and certainly not a scientific hypothesis. In
fact, I would welcome with open arms any proof that these children will be
free of disease'.

'It is surprising. We expected more deaths, and a lot more serious
illness. According to most predictions, the children should have died
within two to three months of coming to us. Instead, we have now had to
set up a nursery school, which I didn't think would be needed, and I'm
planning to negotiate their entry into primary school'. He had also been
preparing to establish group therapy for the mothers and other caregivers,
to deal with their grief at the loss of the children. Instead, the only
losses were happy ones: some of the children became HIV­negative, and were
taken back by relatives or ordinary children's homes. Even those who
persistently tested positive were staying well. 'I don't have any
explanation for it. Will they be alive this time next year? I have no
reason to doubt it: they are healthy'.

As my travels progressed, through Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, it became
more and more obvious that there were great uncertainties over the extent
of African AIDS. The belief that there was an epidemic had taken root in
many people's minds, and some unexpected or unexplained deaths tended to
be seen in the light of this belief. But was there really a new, clearly
identifiable clinical condition?

In Lusaka, Zambia, I was told by Guy Scott, an MP and former cabinet
minister, that the disease threatens to orphan 2 million children, and to
take the lives of large numbers of staff in companies, public utilities,
and government. 'It is ripping through the system. It is an absolute
disaster', he said. Screening surveys conducted in late 1992 had found
that as many as four out of ten sexually active people were testing
HIV­positive, spurring the government into launching a new anti­AIDS
campaign.

But several doctors at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka had a
different view. They responded warmly to the Bio/Technology paper, finding
that it reflected and helped to explain their own experience. They had
been particularly puzzled by an enormous gap between reports of people
testing HIV­positive, and the number of people reported as falling ill
with AIDS ­ fewer than 1000 a year, in a nation of 8 million people.

Dr. Franci Kasolo, head of virology, said work in his department suggested
the HIV figures could not be taken at face value. 'We have found a big
problem with false positives', he said. 'When we repeat the tests, there
are a lot of disparities in the results. A test kit from one manufacturer
behaves differently from another's'. The conclusion was that 'most of our
results are more or less compromised'.

Most of the country's 80 testing centres were unable to afford
confirmatory Western Blot testing after an initial positive ELISA. And in
any case, the Western Blot produced widely differing results. A third,
rapid test had been shown to produce up to 40% false positive results.

Dr. Wilfrid Boayue, the WHO representative in Zambia, said the recent
surveys had shown such a big increase in positive results compared with
six to seven years previously, when the proportion was only about 5 to 8%,
that he shared concern that the country was in the grip of an HIV
epidemic. Kasolo, however, thought changes in the type of test kit used
might contribute to the changing picture. He had a lot of experience with
this, because international aid for developing countries is often tied to
use of materials provided by the donor nations, and the donors keep
changing.

'Most of the kits are supplied by the donors. If one decides not to
provide funds any more, we move to another who will, and the kits come
from that country instead. So the kits vary a lot: reporting can be high
or low, depending on the kit. We have had individuals tested in one
laboratory, and told they are positive, who move on to another, where they
are negative. It is important that we address the whole issue of HIV in
Africa scientifically. There is something going on that we do not
understand'. Dr. Sitali Maswenyeho, a paediatrician at the University
Teaching Hospital and former fellow in AIDS research at the University of
Miami, said he had long argued against the HIV test. 'It's non­specific',
he said. 'The test itself is killing a lot of people here. The stigma is
doing the damage. We have malnutrition, bad water, poor sanitation, and
when on top of that you are told you have an incurable disease, that
really cuts off people's lives'.

Despite concerns over the validity of the HIV test, the presence of a
severe form of immune system failure, affecting mainly sexually active
people, was widely acknowledged. But there was argument over its causes.
Kasolo maintained that a variety of sexually transmitted infections might
be responsible, a view shared by many older Zambians. Others felt it might
be associated with over­use of aphrodisiac drugs, made from plant
sources.

David Chipanta, 22, an HIV­positive man helping with the work of an AIDS
education and counselling organization, said: 'People in the villages tell
us it is not new, but that it has become worse because of promiscuity'.
Despite disagreeing with that view ­ he argued that promiscuity was itself
nothing new ­ he supported the challenge to HIV testing.

In Zimbabwe, health authorities were convinced that AIDS was a real
threat, but Dr. Timothy Stamps, the minister of health and child welfare,
was also concerned that WHO and the 'AIDS industry' had fostered a
damaging epidemic of what he called 'HIV­itis' in Africa. 'My basic worry
is that it's distracting money and attention and personnel from the known
problems such as malaria, tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases and
safe motherhood', he said. He was particularly disturbed by WHO advice
discouraging women who had tested HIV­positive from breast­feeding their
babies.

Despite clear evidence confirming the thesis that the HIV story was
gravely flawed, it was hard for me to be sure, when faced with widely
differing views among those I met, whether or not some new, epidemic
condition was afflicting Africa. But in Tanzania, I met two medically
trained charity workers whose dramatic testimony provided the clearest
evidence yet that the continent was not engulfed by an epidemic of AIDS ­
and a profound insight into how the story of an epidemic had come about.

In mid­life, after finding they could have no children of their own,
Philippe and Evelyne Krynen trained in France as nurses, with a specialist
qualification in tropical medicine, in order to be able to dedicate the
rest of their lives helping Third World orphans. In 1988, they travelled
through central Africa looking for a suitable place to set up a branch of
the French charity Partage, which had agreed to support them. They heard
that the remote Kagera province in northern Tanzania, where Africa's first
cases of AIDS were diagnosed as far back as 1983, was now an epicentre of
the disease, which had orphaned thousands of children.

After a three­day journey to the province in January 1989, a tour of the
worst­hit places conducted by a local Lutheran bishop seemed to confirm
everything they had been told. Whole villages were being destroyed, people
were dying continuously in and around the main township of Bukoba, and HIV
testing suggested up to half the sexually active population was infected.

Philippe, now 51, a former pilot, and Evelyne, 43, a teacher, prepared an
illustrated report on their findings, Voyage des Krynen en Tanzanie, which
was to prove a catalyst for world interest in the social impact of AIDS in
Africa. It presented a dramatic picture: children alone in houses emptied
of adults, or abandoned into the care of grandparents; a football team
destroyed by the disease; old people sitting alone with their dead; black
crosses painted at the entrances of AIDS­stricken homes.

'Here, AIDS does not choose its victims among marginal groups', they
wrote. 'It touches the entire sexually active population, men and women
alike. Extreme sexual liberty, a weak sense of hygiene and a lack of
medical and social support have made the populations of these parts a
particularly homogeneous risk group'.

As I reported in The Sunday Times, it was a message that Western medical
and charitable agencies, urgently wanting to alert people to the perceived
dangers of HIV and AIDS, were more than ready to hear. US, French and
Belgian newspapers, magazines and television stations took up the story.
Aspects of it are still being quoted around the world by AIDS
organizations.

The couple explained to me that in common with many other Westerners who
had seen the AIDS epidemic as a call to arms against the perils of
ignorance and promiscuity, they had felt it was almost impossible to
overstate the dangers. They helped one young villager write a letter to
schoolchildren. It said so many of his team­mates had died that 'we can't
play football any more ­ so behave, and you won't get the disease like we
did here'. The letter featured in pamphlets prepared by a European
Community AIDS prevention project and was distributed widely to schools in
west Africa.

'When we came here we had the textbook knowledge of AIDS in our minds',
Philippe said. 'That it is a sexually transmitted disease; that it would
be very easily transmitted in Africa because other STDs are rampant; that
many Africans are HIV­positive and would get full­blown AIDS after one or
two years, faster than in Europe; and that the virus was passed from
mother to child, affecting 50% of children. This was what we had learned
from our medical studies. And the people who showed me what was happening
here reinforced this belief. What I wrote in my journal was with 100%
bonne conscience'.

Four years on, Partage Tanzanie was now employing some 230 full­time
staff, who were helping 7000 children in 15 of Kagera's villages. There
were 20 nurses, a doctor, a pharmacist, a laboratory technician, office
workers and teachers; and scores of field workers who had got to know the
children, caring for them at day centres, monitoring their health and
ensuring they were well fed. As a result of the increasingly intimate
understanding the Krynens acquired of the region and its people, allied to
the questions the couple started asking arising from their own scientific
training, a very different picture of what was going on started to emerge
compared with their first impressions.

The first clue that there might be something wrong with the standard
medical model of HIV and AIDS came when they started to try to organise
help for children in the border villages. 'Our aim was to help the people
help their children', Evelyne said. 'But in some of the villages we found
nobody was interested in the future, or in the kids, any more. One reason,
we thought, was that they had been told 40­50% were infected and were
going to die, and this in a context where people were indeed dying a lot,
because of poverty and an upsurge in malaria'. (Anti­malarial drugs had
helped more children through to early adulthood, but left them still
vulnerable to the disease. Previously, those who survived the illness in
childhood were more likely to have lifelong immunity).

'The young people were convinced they were going to die anyway, so why
should they think of the children or the future. We said that even if 50%
are infected, 50% are not, so let us find out which are which. Then those
who are free of the virus can think about the future again'.

A pilot study offering HIV tests to their own staff produced a shock: only
5% were positive, although almost all were young and sexually active.
Perhaps they were unrepresentative, the Krynens though because their level
of education was above average. So in 1992 they proposed a mass testing
programme in Bukwali, a village on the border with Uganda where some of
Africa's first AIDS cases had been reported nearly ten years previously.

Encouraged by the promise that a clinic would be established to give free
treatment to anyone testing positive, about 850 people agreed to take part
­ almost the entire population aged between 18 and 60. This time, 13.7%
were found to be HIV­positive, still much lower than the villagers had
been led to believe. The Krynens found that a single positive test could
not be relied on ­ repeat testing would frequently show the same patient
to be negative. The villagers may have shown a higher rate of
HIV­positives simply because they were older, with an average age of about
42 compared with 24 in the staff study. They had beer exposed for longer
to 'whatever it is in Africa that can so readily cause the blood to test
positive', as Evelyn put it.

'We have noticed that with the women, the more children they have, the
more likely they are to be positive. We have five HIV­positive women on
our staff, and all have children, but a stable life. It could be because
being more in contact with doctors and hospitals, and taking more drugs,
or even just giving birth, causes you to accumulate reactivity to the
test. It may not have anything to do with a virus'.

The Krynens also found that when appropriate treatment was given to
villagers who became ill with complaints such as pneumonia and fungal
infections that might have contributed to an AIDS diagnosis, they usually
recovered.

'All of a sudden you put all you have been told about the disease in the
garbage can, and try to reconsider', Evelyne said. 'The 15 villages we
have looked at are in the most affected area of a region that is supposed
to be at the epicentre of AIDS in Africa. When you listen to the people,
you find they had been shocked by some deaths where the effects on the
body were very visual, with fungus infections and skin rashes. But these
can be secondary effects of antibiotics, and the people who died with
these conditions had all been treated before for conditions such as
bronchitis. Nothing is sure; everything is just wind'.

Most of the first deaths reported as AIDS were in young men trading in
black­market goods in the aftermath of the Ugandan war. It started at the
border, where people were dealing in drugs as well as other goods, said
Philippe. 'It's true this group had money and was affected with immune
suppression and a wasting syndrome. But it was not because they had sex
like rabbits that they died. This is what was put in people's minds by
missionaries and other people, but whatever killed them was not sexually
transmitted, because they have not killed their partners. They have not
killed the prostitutes they were using; these girls are still prostitutes
in the same place'.

'Was it a special booze? Was it an amphetamine or aphrodisiac? It is
difficult to give more than hints, but when you listen to the people's
descriptions of those first affected, you find they were saying they had
been poisoned. If the local people said that, for two or three years
before the word AIDS came to the region, why don't we believe them a bit,
and look at what could have poisoned them'?

Today the couple are continuing to use the HIV test, 'just to prove that
we have to stop doing this, that it has nothing to do with AIDS'. They are
training their field workers not to mention HIV or AIDS, but instead to
deal with any known disease they encounter with the best treatment
available, regardless of the patient's HIV status. 'It is not known
whether HIV causes AIDS', they say in a pamphlet produced for the team.
'It is time to come back to science and abandon magic thinking'. Philippe
declares: 'There is no AIDS. It is something that has been invented. There
are no epidemiological grounds for it; it doesn't exist for us'.

If Kagera is not, after all, in the grip of an epidemic of 'HIV disease',
and if there is no AIDS, where have the thousands of orphans come from?
The answer, say the Krynens, is that most of the children are not orphans
at all. Their final disillusionment was to discover that although many
children are raised by their grandparents, that is a long­standing
cultural feature of the region.

'The parents expatriate themselves a lot', Philippe explains. 'They move
away from the region, sending a little money, returning little or never,
but still have many children in the village. They are outwardly orphans,
but raised by the grandmother or grandfather. It has always been like this
here; they may need help, but it has nothing to do with AIDS. Polygamy is
also rampant here and they don't raise all the children. They select very
few and the others are just made and abandoned'. Other children are born
to prostitutes, who may spend much of the year away from the region,
working in the cities.

'You come as a European and ask: 'Who has no mother or father?' They
produce all these children, even though they have a mother or father in
another place. We have been shown false orphans since the beginning ­
children who have parents who never died, but who will not show up any
more. And when the parent has died, nobody has been asking why. It has
nothing to do with an epidemic. Families just bring them as orphans, and
if you ask how the parents died they will say AIDS. It is fashionable
nowadays to say that, because it brings money and support'.

'If you say your father has died in a car accident it is bad luck, but if
he has died from AIDS there is an agency to help you. The local people
have seen so many agencies coming, called AIDS support programmes, that
they want to join this group of victims. Everybody claims to be a victim
of AIDS nowadays . . . It is good to know that this epidemic which was
going to wipe out Africa is just a big bubble of soap'.

Posters warning of the dangers of ukimwi (AIDS) adorn the cabins of the
Victoria, a steamer that ferries passengers on the nine­hour journey from
Mwanza, on the southern shore of Lake Victoria, to Bukoba. When the
Krynens first made the journey, they found a small town with only a
handful of foreigners and few cars. Today, as the ferry arrives, the tiny
port seizes up with vehicles, including the white Land Rovers and Toyotas
characteristic of the numerous AIDS agencies that have flourished in much
of central Africa.

'We have everybody coming here now ­ the World Bank, the churches, the Red
Cross, the UN Development Programme, the African Medical Research
Foundation ­ about 17 organizations reportedly doing something for AIDS in
Kagera', Philippe said. 'It brings jobs, cars ­ the day there is no more
AIDS, a lot of development is going to go away'.

The Krynens work hard. They keep files on all their donor families and
careful records of how the money is spent. Their home, a modest bungalow
on a hillside overlooking Lake Victoria, is the hub of the project, with
its own HIV­testing laboratory. All day a stream of workers comes by to
give feedback and take directions. A few children who have nowhere else to
go live in an adjoining building. With such direct, practical help being
given to suffering people, perhaps it does not matter too much whether the
children are AIDS orphans or not. But the Krynens are angry because false
information continues to be spread to Africa and the world.

'Africa is a market for many things, an experimental ground for many
organizations and a 'good conscience' ground for many charities', Philippe
said. 'It is very easy to 'do good' in Africa. It is so disorganised that
the one who is doing the good is also the one reporting the good he is
doing. So it is a perfect field for charity ­ the fake charity which is
99% of the charity in Africa, charity which benefits the benefactors. The
Krynens felt strongly about this because of their own involvement in
triggering an invasion of AIDS agencies to Kagera. They now know that the
stories they told, of houses and villages abandoned because of AIDS, were
untrue.

'The houses that were empty were closed because they were the second or
third homes of someone in Dar es Salaam', said Philippe. And the black
crosses painted outside homes were leftovers from a populalion census, not
a warning of AIDS. 'I learned this later. I have never seen a village with
no adults, where children are like wolves in the forest. You know who is
responsible for these stories? Partly, Partage. We said that if we did not
do something very quickly, these villages would be emptied of adults, and
children would be like wild animals. The stories have been printed and
reprinted, without the 'if' '.

'My medical studies led me to believe that AIDS was devastating and the
people who showed me the situation here reinforced this belief. I jumped
into this, and made others believe it. And now I know it was not true. But
I know many more things that were not true. Nothing was true'.

'It is terrible to consider you have done so many things you thought
worthwhile, when in fact you were misled. It is difficult to adjust
afterwards. Nobody knows who is responsible for the first
misinterpretation, but as time passes it gets bigger and bigger. These
ideas were not based on any studies; they were just fashion. But when you
are here, and you have to witness the reality of what happens in the
field, you cannot agree with any of the statements they are making in
Europe about AIDS in Africa. We discovered we were in a full­blown lie
about AIDS. Everybody participates in this lie, willingly or not. No
individual is responsible, but it is a big scandal'.

'The world has been brainwashed about AIDS. It has become a disease in
itself, without the necessity of having sick people any more. You don't
need AIDS patients to have an AIDS epidemic nowadays, because what is
wrong doesn't need to be proved. Nobody checks; AIDS exists by itself'.

'We came here to help orphans of AIDS. Now we are facing a situation where
there are no orphans and no AIDS. We are in the heart of AIDS country. You
are talking to people who 'discovered' AIDS here, and who now say it is a
lie. We expect to have to pay for what we say. It will be the price of
truth'.

Articles I filed from Africa were often followed up or reprinted in
regional and national newspapers there, after they had appeared in The
Sunday Times. With so much money and prestige at stake, this caused some
of the people I had interviewed to come under great pressure to recant.
They responded differently to these pressures.

Father D'Agostino was upset to see the puzzlement and hope he had
expressed in relation to the survival of his 'AIDS babies' put in the
context of the wider critique of the HIV theory of AIDS that The Sunday
Times had been airing. To the medical profession, this is a heresy, not
just a different interpretation of the facts, and a press release he
issued on September 17 on behalf of the Children of God Relief Institute,
which runs Nyumbani, read more like a religious creed than a comment from
a scientist. It stated:

Recently, the London Sunday Times ran a long front­page story and the
Nairobi Nation an editorial page 'special report'. Both papers
misconstrued the facts of the unfortunate life circumstances of the
children at 'Nyumbani' in order to prove an erroneous thesis. While this
does no harm to the children themselves, it does a grave disservice to the
larger community because it panders to the all too prevalent mental
process of denial. This denial only increases the universal and deadly
threat of HIV/AIDS. In order to correct these errors, we must assert:

(1) We do believe in the 'germ' theory of disease as proposed by Louis
Pasteur. This universally proven theory is accepted by compassionate and
credible scientists worldwide.

(2) We believe that there is a virus designated 'HIV' which has been
isolated and is responsible for the fatal disease called AIDS.

(3) Since there is no cure for the ravages of the HIV virus, we believe
that the only strategy to contain and prevent spreading of the disease
AIDS is for all sectors of society to join hands in creating awareness
and, urge action in an appropriate manner.

(4) Compassion, understanding, care and respect for human dignity must
fashion any program to help those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

(5) We invite any party so inclined to help our efforts to assist in
alleviating the tragic plight of those voiceless HIV/AIDS sufferers ­ the
abandoned child.

(6) We totally disagree with any scientifically unsubstantiable theory
that denies the reality of the causation of the disease HIV/AIDS.

The uncertainties Father D'Agostino had clearly expressed in a recorded
interview, as he pondered the surprising good health of his foundlings,
were now gone, replaced by a reaffirmation of belief in the HIV doctrine
of AIDS. I knew nothing of this press release at the time ­ I was still
travelling through Africa, and had not even seen the Sunday Times ­ and
although Father D'Agostino says he faxed a response to the article to the
newspaper's office, it was never received there.

In fact, the first I knew of his dissatisfaction was when I received the
following letter, dated October 22, after I had written to him on my
return to London enclosing cuttings of my Africa articles.

Dear Neville,

I want to thank you for the courtesy of sending the article appearing in
the 3rd October edition and also for the pleasant experience that we all
had when you visited Nyumbani. That being said, I must confess to some
reservations.

You and I look at the world with quite different perspectives. You, from
that of a journalist and myself, as a committed medical man. Our goals are
quite different. I, after having spent at least 14 full years in the
pursuit of medical knowledge, am committed to using that eclectic
knowledge for the good of mankind. I am not espousing any particular
philosophy or theory when I attempt to enhance the body's (and mind's)
natural healing powers. That being said then, I quite disagree with your
point of view. I am trying to be charitable in assuming that you have
taken this task for humanitarian reasons, but I must say there is a
question about that at times.

I certainly question the Sunday Times approach to the problem because it
is quite evident that they are more interested in selling copies rather
than the pursuit of truth. They have no care for the terrible consequences
to people when they are permanently and fatally injured by believing the
misinformation that is being peddled. A primary principle in the practice
of conventional medicine is that if one cannot do any good, at least do
not do any harm. This principle is observed only in the breach by the
Sunday Times because they are doing great harm without even considering
the possibility . . . and for mere gold.

Another point: I was able to fax a response to the article but never got
any sort of admission of reception or acknowledgement. Would it be
possible for you to inquire as to whether or not they did receive my fax
and what they plan to do about it, if anything?

Finally, I want to state that this is not a personal issue and I would
look forward to your visiting us once again, but this time, being quite
open about our stand with regard to the terrible consequences of the
infection by the HIV virus.

With all best wishes, A. D'Agostino, SJ, MD

On October 29, I replied as follows:

Dear Father D'Agostino,

I was greatly distressed to receive your letter of October 22 today.
Firstly, because neither I nor the Letters Editor had known anything of
your sending a response to my article of October 3; and secondly, because
of your evident distress over what you call the Sunday Times approach to
the issue of HIV and AIDS. I had felt that my article was a
straightforward description of what you had told me and what I had
observed for myself. I also know how much both the Editor and myself have
wanted to contribute to understanding about HIV and AIDS, and how wrong
you are to allege that we are doing harm 'for mere gold'. Have you seen
the other articles I filed? Some of the people involved in those have
subsequently come under bitter attack from parties who feel both the truth
and their own interests have been threatened, but perhaps the difference
is that they were aware of what a contentious issue this is.

It is not possible to back away from these issues: the point of view to
which the newspaper has been giving an airing is that immeasurable harm,
including much loss of life resulting from panic and false diagnosis, is
being done by the blind pursuit of the HIV hypothesis against much
evidence of its inadequacies. Indeed, we quoted ­ accurately ­ Dr Timothy
Stamps, Minister for Health and Child Welfare in Zimbabwe, as saying 'the
HIV industry . . . is now in my view one of the biggest threats to
health'.

Your own uncertainty was very clear when we met. What has happened to make
you write as you did? I do apologise if you have been embroiled in a
controversy against your wishes, but the strength of feeling on this issue
should help to indicate to you that something may be terribly wrong in the
view that your profession has currently espoused so dogmatically about the
cause of AIDS.

I thank you for your kindness in emphasising that you do not see this as a
personal issue. Please do send a copy of your original fax to the Letters
Editor, with a copy in the post in case of further problems. Mark the
letter clearly for the Letters Editor. I should also be grateful to
receive a copy: the news desk fax, which is nearest to me, is ....

Neither I nor the newspaper ever received that fax from Father D'Agostino.
He told me by phone, when the issue flared up again, that he had decided
against sending it, after receiving my letter, feeling that it was by then
too late. But that did not stop him making a statement the following
January to the Independent on Sunday, a newspaper which has been most
vociferous in Britain in promoting the official view on HIV and AIDS and
in attacking my own reporting. In it, he condemned the 'gross distortions
and quite incorrect implication' made as a result of my interviewing him,
and declaring that he had received no acknowledgement of his original
fax.

I like and admire Father D'Agostino and am sad that I caused him distress,
but I feel quite sure we were right to run the article. The quotes
directly attributed to him were taken verbatim from my recording and
expressed his observations as a human being and a doctor, as opposed to a
politician and defender of the HIV faith. I can understand his discomfort
at the sweeping frontpage headline used on the story, 'Babies give lie to
African AIDS'. There was also an unfortunate piece of editing, that
attributed more uncertainty to him than he had expressed. The article I
filed from Nairobi included a paragraph in which I wrote: 'The suspicion
is growing that many 'AIDS' cases are really old diseases given a new
name, though sometimes made worse by civil war and economic and social
decline, and that people who test HIV­positive are not, as most have been
led to believe, the victims of a new, inevitably lethal disease'. The
edited version correctly stated that in common with growing numbers of
scientists and doctors around the world, D'Agostino was beginning to
question whether HIV really was the killer it had been made out to be.
That was the purport of the entire interview, during which I had told him
about the Bio/Technology paper and the reappraisal of the HIV theory of
AIDS being sought by those doctors and scientists. But the article then
went on to state that 'He, like them, suspects that many 'AIDS' cases are
really old diseases given a new name . . .' etc., a suspicion I had not
attributed to him.

His statement to the Independent on Sunday, however, made it plain that he
was now putting all his doubts behind him. He said four children in his
care had since died of AIDS out of a total of 55 with HIV, and that two or
three others had AIDS. He had no doubt, the paper reported, that children
infected with HIV would eventually succumb to AIDS.

Since my work in this field has so often shown me how that very
expectation among doctors tends to become a self­fulfilling prophecy, I
rang D'Agostino in disbelief to ask him if that was really what he now
thought. Yes, he said, 'I never questioned the medical model; the only
thing I questioned was why they didn't die at three, why they were still
alive at seven. I never questioned that they would die. I know they will
succumb'. There was 'no question' in his mind that the four had died of
AIDS. In one, it had been carditis, that refused to clear up with the most
up­to­date antibiotics. When I questioned whether that was an
AIDS­defining illness, and asked him about the other deaths, Father
D'Agostino grew angry and told me they died of HIV, and he was a doctor,
and I had no right to question his clinical judgement.

D'Agostino told me he had come under a lot of pressure locally, in
particular through medical channels, and I do not know what other
pressures he had to bear. But they could hardly have been more intense
than those that befell the Krynens after my article about their changed
vision of AIDS in Africa. The European Community's AIDS Task Force, which
had previously made a star of Philippe Krynen, now disowned him and
cancelled a promise of funding for Partage. There were even attempts to
have the couple thrown out of the country. They were also invited to
ecant, and condemn the Sunday Times, as in a letter received from Dr.
Angus Nicoll, consultant epidemiologist with Britain's Public Health
Laboratory Service, who inquired through Partage's headquarters in
France:

Further to my communication of December 20th I have been sent the attached
letter and press release by Father D'Agostino in Kenya. As you will read
they are complaining of some misrepresentation by the Sunday Times and are
asking that the newspaper convey Dr. D'Agostino's views. I also attach a
copy of the original article . . . After reading these letters I wondered
whether Mr. and Mrs. Krynen had been fully happy with their coverage and
had had any experience like Dr D'Agostino in trying to make a correction?

Philippe Krynen told me that he received the same letter again in January.
The answer suggested by such an amazing approach, he said ­ though he did
not actually send it ­ was 'questions put by the police are only answered
in the presence of our lawyer'. In fact, he stood by and continues to
stand by every word in our article.

In February 1994, the Journal of Infectious Diseases published the results
of a study conducted in Kinshasa, Zaire, to try to establish whether HIV
infection was associated with leprosy. About 70% of 57 leprosy patients,
and 30% of a group of 39 contacts, tested positive according to two
leading versions of ELISA. But after laboratory investigations, it was
found that proteins from the leprosy agent were causing crossreactions
with the 'HIV' test. When this was taken into account, the researchers
concluded that in fact only two of the leprosy patients, and none of the
contacts, were HIV­infected. Testing with Western Blot was even more
misleading. It gave a positive reaction in 85% of the patients who were
negative with the other tests. The authors, who included Harvard's Dr. Max
Essex, one of the originators of the theory that HIV originated in Africa,
pointed out that the microbe responsible for tuberculosis is in the same
family of mycobacterial agents. They concluded that ELISA and Western Blot
tests 'may not be sufficient for HIV diagnosis in AIDS­endemic areas of
central Africa where prevalence of mycobacterial diseases is quite high'.

These findings are exactly in line with the Krynens' observations, with
what Father D'Agostino originally allowed himself to see, and with the
Eleopulos paper in Bio/Technology. They go to the root of the bad science
that has misled so many into believing Africa is in the grip of an
epidemic of 'HIV disease'. The disease is in the minds of the scientists
responsible for creating this monumental blunder, and for perpetuating it
with campaigns to discredit those who have sought to offer an alternative
perspective

'AIDS' in Africa is a collection of illnesses, some well known, others
perhaps yet to be identified, brought together under an artificial
umbrella by their shared ability to cause millions to give a positive
result in what has come to be known as the HIV test.

As Professor P.A.K. Addy, head of clinical microbiology at the University
of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, told New African magazine:
'I've known for a long time that AIDS is not a crisis in Africa as the
world is being made to understand. But in Africa it is very difficult to
stick your neck out and say certain things. The West came out with those
frightening statistics on AIDS in Africa because it was unaware of certain
social and clinical conditions. In most of Africa, infectious diseases,
particularly parasitic infections, are common. And there are other
conditions that can easily compromise or affect one's immune system.

'The diagnosis itself, merely being told you have AIDS, is enough to kill,
and is killing people'.

I salute the Krynens, and others like them in Africa and elsewhere, who
have been prepared to risk everything for the sake of telling the truth as
they see it. *