MISLEADING THE WEST
The article state that the figures around Aids have been overestimated and abused for fund raising. First of all Europe and North America have never been threatened by an Aids epidemic. It has only been special groups of people, like homosexuals, that are truly in a serious risk of getting infected under normal circumstances. But in contradict with this there has been large investments in research on the disease and there has been a wide spread campaign warning people about the danger. Two things happened thus, people where feared by a non existent threat and therefore changing their habits and attitudes and also became willing to donate money. Secondly the disproportional investment in research on Aids deprived budget to invest in other research, unnecessary exposing society to the danger of other diseases.

MISLEADING AFRICA
But what about Africa? There are two general accepted assertion: (1) A lot of people on the African continent are HIV infected and (2) a lot of people on the African continent die because of the disease. In contrary of this assertion though the facts about Uganda, once considered to be the epic center of a world wide Aids epidemic, state different. The population of that country is growing, in fact it is one of fastest growing countries in the world, while death rates are dropping. How can this contradictory development be explained.

The assertions on the effects of the infection, everybody was expected to die young for example, show to have been wrong. More over the figures on the amount of infected people have been at least doubtful. The tests to diagnoze people have been very inaccurate. Further these tests have only been done on small groups of people, on which information the total of  infected persons have been extrapolated in…Geneve, where they even highered the numbers to prevent them from being to low. Exemplary for the inaccurateness of this information gathering is the definition of Aids, in terms of symptoms, that has been utilized: loss of weight, fever and coughing. These are actually the symptoms of TBC.

FROM WHERE TO WHERE THE MONEY WENT…
The result of all this where high budgets for research on Aids and “thus the pockets of the researchers.” Income for the same people that reacted very emotionally on publications around this atrocities without, and that is very much not done in the world of scientific reports, for a reason I say, mentioning the conflict of interest they might have with it.

Well…the most shocking, off course, was presented at the end of the article and for those who can’t draw that conclusion by themselves all ready I will state it here. The result of this whole situation, in the opinion of the writer that is, is the cut downs on other expanses that have been made to finance the research on Aids. Just to mention a few: other health care, education, infrastructure, aggriculture… Also it has been feeding the taboo around abortion, by discouraging  anti conception other than condoms, since this is thought to be the remedy against the Aids epidemic.

WHAT’S THE POWER OF PUBLICITY?
For us it is hard to judge this article, and its opponent, on truth. But it is exemplary for the power of the media or publicity in general. What if this article is true and there could have been made more investments in the earlier named examples? And if it is not true, but we adopt it as the new truth, what will happen with the Aids epidemic? I think it shows the importance of transparency.