Why are “WE” waiting on the cavalry?
on July 29th, 2008 at 8:10 pmAIDS: The Cavalry is not coming to save us (CNN)
My initial response: When the White homosexual community realized that AIDS was a serious threat, many of them had the sense to use the same type of prevention that quite frankly many folks in our own community simply will not use. The HIV rate went down in the White homosexual community not because of any cure, but because they took the necessary precautions not to get it.
[BREAK: This was going to be a very short post, but after coming across the next article I got angry. Why? Because it confirms what I have been saying for a while about how the media consistently portrays Blacks as too dumb to comprehend common sense or lacking the ability to exercise self-control--ESPECIALLY on this AIDS issue.]
For years the media has been spinning speculation about why AIDS is more prevalent amongst those of African decent vs. those who are White. How have they been doing it? By portraying the genetic structure of Blacks as inferior to Whites (same argument has been used for the rise of diabetes in the Black/Hispanic population). I’ve even come across some Blacks who strangely enough were quick to embrace this theory. This reporter for Wired magazine calls out the media on this overstated theory.
Brandon Keim writes
But the researchers also surmised that, as around 90 percent of Africans have the mutation, it accounts for 11% of sub-Saharan Africa’s AIDS burden. This angle made me uneasy — partly because it’s a very preliminary study on which to base such a broad extrapolation, but mostly because it’d be easy to overstate the mutation’s importance.
Seen in the wrong light, the numbers could present Africa’s AIDS tragedy as a biological inevitability. Several press accounts do exactly that. The New York Times credits the mutation for “explaining why the disease is more common there than expected.” Reuters says it could “help explain why AIDS has hit Africa harder than all other parts of the world,” as this can’t be fully rooted in “sexual behavior and other social factors.” The Guardian says it “may go some way” to explaining the African prevalence of AIDS. And the Gene Expression blog titles its coverage, “Evolution, a reason for the African HIV epidemic?”
Not that the genetics of AIDS in Africa should be ignored. But let’s put these findings in perspective: the World Health Organization estimates that 6.1 percent of adult sub-Saharan Africans are HIV-positive. Shave that 6.1 percent by one-tenth — the cases apparently attributable to the mutation — and it’s still ten times higher than the 0.5 percent HIV infection rate of North America and western Europe. And when rates drop to 3% in Angola but jump to 20% or more in its neighbors, genes are the last place to start looking for clues. (more…)
And as if that was bad enough, check out what Keim also wrote about back in November of last year.
AIDS Vaccines Could Weaken Immune System
Viruses used in experimental AIDS immunizations may weaken the immune systems of mice, possibly explaining why the vaccines keep failing in people.
In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Wistar Institute researchers injected mice with a virus used in AIDS vaccines to carry pieces of HIV.
Ideally, the body is primed by exposure to the HIV fragments, making it better able to defend against the real thing. But the researchers found that white blood cells produced in response to the vaccine were defective. They were prone to infection, didn’t release immune system-activating chemicals and didn’t proliferate after their first real HIV exposure. (He has some additional links in this article. Click here to read the rest)
Now I know I went off on a lil’ tangent on Pernessa Seele’s piece in CNN, but this whole notion that Black Americans are suffering from AIDS because “the cavalry” aren’t saving them from this dreaded disease by making folks make better life choices is absurd. I have long believed that much of the world is using this Africans infected with HIV to some degree as guinea pigs by inoculating them with all types of medicines that apparently not doing the job (come on, we have been at this FOR YEARS with BILLIONS of dollars). Could it be that some of these vaccines are actually weakening the immune system? Many of us here in the West will never know as the noise from our AIDS benefit concerts and self back patting for helping those little po’ Africans could very well be muting the real feedback from these global patients.
