Multibillionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have decided
that their chosen cause to fight in the world is the population
explosion, particularly in the Third World.
The AIDS Industry beat them to that punch years ago.
As long ago as May of 1988 the New York Times was reporting that
doctors were considering giving AZT to healthy children testing
HIV-positive and even unborn fetuses. Thus the horizons of AIDS
medication finally enveloped every moment of existence, from pre-birth to
death.
The ethical concerns for everyone involved in the discussion, from policy
flacks to activists , focused on the privacy issues for pregnant women
who needed to be tested for HIV, not on the fact that giving the
drug to unborn children had not been tested and might have dangerous
consequences. That is to be accepted as an unfortunate necessity of
treating the disease.
To this day, ethicists and socially minded journalists debate mandatory
HIV testing of pregnant women. But the drugs started pouring into the
bodies of HIV-positive children long ago. Once Glaxo-Welcome published a
(prematurely terminated) study showing that their drug decreased
transmission rates from infected mother to child, ethical considerations
had to take a back seat to stopping the dreaded HIV.
Jump to Africa. A new report by the CDC's Dr.
Alan Greenberg estimates that HIV infection rates are far in
excess of previous speculation. And there is a flurry of discussion at
the 1Oth International Conference on Sexually
Transmitted Disease and AIDS in Africa on how best to prevent
transmission from mother to child. The method of choice? AZT, of course.
Sensible scientists, white collar ethicists and concerned activists alike
look to the saving grace of chemotherapies to save Africans from their
fate. They don't look to the evidence that AZT leads to increased
death rates, deformities and developmental
retardation in neonates. Nor do they look to positively impact the
factors that lead Africa to have a three-fold higher mother-to-child
transmission rate than Europe.
In fact, AIDS activists have abandoned any hope of affecting meaningful
progress in bettering social conditions that cause disease and death both
here in the US and around the globe. That vitamin A deficiency leads to
significantly higher rates
of perinatal transmission, and vitamin supplementation can reduce HIV transmission to
a greater extent than AZT is both a matter of record and a fact to
ignore by those dedicated to saving the children of both Africa
and the US.
Rather than rattle the federal cages for meaningful nutrition programs or
comprehensive prenatal care, activists are content to endorse the export
of female condoms to Brazil and
Uganda, which has just ordered "several million." It is far, far
easier to lobby on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry than it is to
get wealth out of the hands of the likes of Gates and Warren and
distribute its rewards to those who are dying without it.
With millions of pregnant women "eligible" to receive AZT to prevent HIV
transmission, this will mean millions of children will be at greatly
increased risk of birth defects and death from the toxic effects of
exposure to that chemotherapy, one that does not target HIV-infected
cells but kills all cells equally. Globally, the vast majority -
essentially all - of the women receiving this gift will be poor,
minority, lower class, under- or uneducated US and Third World women and
their unsuspecting children.
It is just more icing on a cake that everyone from Reagan to Clinton &
Co. have been serving to the lower class for years. Under the ruberic of
"AIDS control" they do it with the blessing activists who find it easier
to export and hand out pills than to work toward changing the global
status quo.
Bill and Warren are in luck if they want to put a cap on the number of
babies churned out by the world's underclass. The AIDS industry is way
ahead of them, and nobody seems to be concerned about stopping the
machine.