> Health and Disease > Immune System > AIDS

Jane Doe of Montreal refuses to give toxic, lifelong medication to her two healthy sons. She loses custody of them as a consequence. Another woman in Montreal hears this and decides to have an abortion.

A woman in Maine has a daughter die on the same medication and finds that the debilitating symptoms she and her son were also experiencing rapidly disappear after they stop taking the drug. The state takes her to court to force her to give medicine to her son–but she wins her case.

A couple in Oregon is less fortunate. They are "legally" forced to medicate their newborn infant and the mother is forbidden to nurse him! A woman in British Columbia is harassed by social workers who threaten to force her to medicate her two children and stop nursing her baby, so she hastily leaves the province.

A couple in London refuses to test their new baby and flee from England after losing their case, fearing that forced medication will follow forced testing.

All these people have one thing in common–both they and their children are HIV-positive. They all reject the need for medication intervention for their condition and for that of their HIV-positive children. In fact, they question whether the HIV test indicates an illness at all.

The AIDS Epidemic

To most Canadians, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is something that happens to other people-largely gay men and drug addicts. Most people believe that HIV is the cause of AIDS, that new drugs indicate miraculous advances in medicine and that the tests for HIV are accurate-unless they themselves test positive, of course.

Just like a diagnosis of terminal cancer, people are completely unprepared for this shattering moment. They rely on their doctors for advice, which is almost always to immediately start a program of drugs to try to stop the virus from its deadly advance. They usually do not question the myth that they will die a painful and early death, but hope that the drugs can buy time.

Canada’s top AIDS scientist, Dr Mark Wainberg, believes that HIV always leads to AIDS. In his opinion, those people who question the accuracy of HIV tests, or whether immunosuppressive drugs are wise for a disease characterized by immunosuppression, are a threat to public health and should be thrown in jail!

Considering the fatal nature of the current HIV diagnosis (if death is really the outcome), perhaps parents are within their rights to let their child die a natural death, as opposed to gaining a longer, but lower quality of life with medication. Few people would consider Jane Doe to be behaving more sanely than her doctors, yet her do-nothing approach to HIV has worked. Fourteen years after being found HIV-positive, she is still extremely healthy and has never taken medication.

AIDS and AZT

The oldest and still most widely prescribed AIDS medications are nucleoside analogs. If DNA is likened to a chain of beads, a nucleoside analog is a broken bead that can attach at one end, but not at the other. These drugs are supposed to stop retroviruses from being incorporated into DNA, but their inevitable incorporation into a growing chain of DNA will cause replication to halt.

One of these nucleoside analogs (AZT) is prescribed to pregnant women to prevent transmission of HIV to their fetuses. It’s also prescribed to HIV-positive children. Side effects of nucleoside analogs are similar to chemotherapy: anemia so serious that transfusions are required. These drugs cause bone marrow destruction, peripheral nerve damage, failure of the pancreas and many other side effects. They can cross the placenta and cause cancer, birth defects and mutations.

The Price Of Health

There are several reasons why AIDS doctors and researchers may be so adamant that not taking anti-HIV drugs is irresponsible–money, money and money. Dr Mark Wainberg, for example, has acknowledged being a shareholder in the Montreal company Biochem Pharma, the manufacturer of 3TC, an HIV drug. While the income from one patient is probably not significant, the impression that every rational person supports taking drugs is worth millions to doctors, researchers, hospitals and manufacturers.

If it becomes legitimate to question whether HIV tests are accurate, whether HIV always leads to AIDS, whether AIDS is always fatal without medication and whether anti-HIV drugs are useful, the entire infrastructure will collapse. While that would be the end of the career of men like Dr Mark Wainberg, for Jane Doe this would be the end of her nightmare.

No Report Card

The Canadian government doesn't have statistics on how many Canadians are taking HIV medications, let alone how many adverse reactions there are.

Every page of one Health Canada report of adverse reactions notes "Only a small proportion of suspected adverse reactions are reported to the program." Other estimates suggest that only one to 10 per cent of adverse reactions are reported.

In HIV/AIDS, where the drugs can destroy the bone marrow, and therefore the immune system, it is very difficult to distinguish the disease from the side effects of the therapy.

Glaxo Wellcome, the largest manufacturer of AIDS drugs, claims that a list of adverse reactions to their AIDS drugs in Canada is "proprietary to the company."

David Crowe is the president of the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society at 403-220-0129 or online at aras.ab.ca.

Source: alive #215, September 2000