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Alternative Medicine in the News
October 2010 special edition 91
published weekly
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Read this article twice
Dear ,
I send you an article "Did doctors jumpstart the HIV pandemic?" as a matter of awareness. You may agree or disagree with its proposals, but I request that before you delete it you think about it a bit.
It's published from Reuters in New York. The link is
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68N4YV20100924?pageNumber=1
I would like you to read the article twice.
First time, just take in the news itself.
The second time, please think about the implications.
Doctor: first, do no harm
The medical professional community is one that, generally, never likes to own up to its mistakes and the public media, being sponsored, hardly ever writes about medical mistakes. So it's surprising to find this article in Reuters. For me, this article provokes a lot of thought about the value and trustworthiness of conventional Western medicine and the forces that drive the profession into a money-making machine.
The mentality of the leaders of conventional medicine has not changed much in 90 years, or if anything, has grown more protective of its domination over the public. The Hippocratic adage to the physician "First - do no harm" is, in practice, not given much attention. I say this because in the name of "treatment" the end result is -so often- more sickness for the individual- in the form of debilitating side-effects- and for the society in the form of more and more uncontrollable "super bugs" resistant to anybody's treatment, etc. Then, to justify such treatments, we are told that the risks are "statistically acceptable".
In this regard, generally speaking, traditional -time-tested- systems of medicine around the world have their advantage. Because while they may -or, true, may not- cure a particular person of disease, at least they are designed to Do No Harm in the process to individuals or greater society.
We should keep public discourse open to all modes of medicine and treatments. There are other options which should be investigated and not be shut out of public options in treatment. As the saying goes "The best medicine is the one that cures."
And what's that old stigma about Africans being responsible for HIV?
On this, what more can I say? Until the intervention of Western medicine whatever theorectical, limited infection of HIV that may or may not have been circulating in the Congo population, it certainly didn't spread until......
Well, anyway, please read and think. That's all. Thank you,
Didi
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Did doctors jumpstart the HIV pandemic?
By Frederik Joelving
NEW YORK |
Fri Sep 24, 2010 5:41pm EDT
(Reuters Health)
- Perhaps it wasn't sex workers and fast-growing cities that launched
HIV onto its deadly global rampage, but well-meaning doctors using
dirty needles in the first half of the 20th century.
While it's hard to know for
sure today, more than 90 years after the virus emerged, two new studies
hint that campaigns to eradicate tropical diseases in Africa might have
helped HIV gain an early foothold among humans.
"This
is sort of an example of good intentions gone wrong," said Dr. Thomas
Strickland, an expert in infectious diseases at Baltimore's University
of Maryland, who was not involved in the research.
"They were saving lives. They just didn't know that they were also setting up the pandemic of HIV."
The
virus jumped from chimps to humans -- morphing from simian
immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, to human immunodeficiency virus -- in
central Africa in the early 1920s.
Most
likely, scientists speculate, a hunter got infected through a bite or a
scratch as he prowled for bush meat and butchered it west of the Ubangi
River in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
What
is still a matter of debate is how a blood-borne disease infecting one
or a few individuals in a remote area could ever spread to the more
than 33 million people who were infected by 2008, and kill two million
of them.
To try to answer that
question, Dr. Jacques Pepin, of the Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec,
Canada, hopped on a plane to central Africa. His goal was to track the
spread of less lethal viruses -- as proxies for HIV -- among villagers
who remembered the colonial era.
For
one of two studies published this month, Pepin's team knocked on doors
in dozens of villages in the Central African Republic to find seniors
who'd been exposed to the sleeping sickness epidemic that ravaged the
area between 1936 and 1950.
They
asked a bunch of questions of more than 900 villagers, including
whether or not they'd been treated for sleeping sickness -- at the time
a grueling, hard-to-forget series of injections, Pepin said.
The
researchers also took blood samples. Because the villagers who first
caught HIV would be long dead today, Pepin decided to use the
less-deadly hepatitis C virus as well as another blood-borne virus
(human T cell lymphotropic virus 1, or HTLV-1) as models for how HIV
could have been inadvertently transmitted by the French colonial
doctors treating sleeping sickness.
What
they found was striking: if a person had been treated for the sleeping
disease before 1951, the chances that he or she had been infected with
hepatitis C tripled. And HTLV-1 showed a similar pattern.
"What
happened is that for a long time, the needles and syringes used to
administer the intravenous drugs were not single-use," Pepin told
Reuters Health. "There were a lot of patients and not a lot of needles,
so the sterilization of needles was not very efficient."
"If
HIV was present in one of these patients 50 years ago, we can assume
that they probably transmitted HIV," he said. "It is exactly like
intravenous drug users who share needles."
According
to Pepin, that would also explain why the number of people 65 years and
older who'd been treated for sleeping sickness was six times lower than
would be expected from historical data: the missing seniors could have
died of AIDS, the immune system breakdown caused by HIV.
"Everybody now is getting infected from
having sex," said Strickland, who wrote an editorial about the new
findings, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
"But
that is not very good transmission. You can have heterosexual sex ten
or fifteen times without getting infected. But if you get injected with
a contaminated needle, the risk is much higher."
Pepin's
other study shows that in Cameroon, a neighboring state that also used
to be under French rule, massive outbreaks of hepatitis C in the first
half of the 19th century were related to malaria treatment with the
drug quinine.
More than half the hundreds of graying heads he rounded up had traces of an earlier hepatitis C infection in their blood.
"The
most important mode of infection was the intravenous treatment of
malaria," said Pepin. "If we put all of this together, it shows that
there was a lot of transmission of different viruses through different
interventions for tropical diseases."
"Probably HIV was transmitted as well," he argues.
But nobody is left to bear witness of what really happened, and not all scientists believe Pepin's explanation.
"It
is a wonderful study on the hepatitis C virus," said Michael Worobey, a
biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who studies the
origins of HIV. "I'm not so convinced it should have been sold on the
HIV/SIV angle."
His version of
what happened follows the traditional line of argument among
scientists: as colonial powers began building cities and railroads,
they transformed former woodlands into densely populated towns rife
with prostitution -- perfect hotbeds for blood-borne diseases.
Eventually an infected villager made his way to the city, setting off the HIV epidemic like a spark falling on a dry savanna.
"I think a train is a much better way to get a virus to a city than a needle," Worobey told Reuters Health.
He
said the idea that doctors kicked off the HIV pandemic has been around
for years. And while the new experiments are probably the first to test
it, he added, they don't settle the question.
To
Pepin, the two explanations aren't mutually exclusive. Dirty needles
"played a substantial role that was probably as important as
prostitution," he said.
Although
single-use needles are now commonplace in most of the world, and
unprotected sex is the major reason people get HIV, Pepin said some
wisdom might still be gleaned from what he found.
"Hopefully it will make doctors a bit more prudent about novel medical interventions," he said.
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Medical Disclaimer:
The information contained within does not take the place of medical diagnosis or
prescription. See your health care provider in case of sickness.
Editorial Disclaimer: Publication of these articles are to promote food for thought. The opinions expressed in these articles may not be the opinion of editors.
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