AIDS-why then?

Recently I heard a few people insist only gay men experience AIDS. This is a dangerous belief. Can a woman be certain her heterosexual partner is HIV-negative? Are women and children not infected with HIV, except in Africa?

Time and information made me revise my thinking about that disease. In 1985, I was an RN in a large Boston hospital. A few very sick patients without diagnoses were admitted to my unit. Since this was before hospital stays were limited by insurance companies and DRG’s (Diagnostic-Related Groups), these patients remained on the unit for about three months before they were diagnosed. That was when my co-workers and I became familiar with an incurable disease called AIDS. Universal precautions (wearing gloves, and masks and gowns if we were likely to be splattered with contaminated body fluids) had not yet been instituted in the hospital where I worked. Therefore, we took care of these HIV-infected patients in the same way as we took care of other patients. None of the nurses on my unit became infected with HIV and I don’t believe we spread that infection to other patients.

At first most of the patients diagnosed with AIDS on my unit were gay. Parents often discovered their son’s sexual orientation at the same time as these parents found out their sons had an incurable disease and would soon die. Families had a hard time coping.

Before long I learned that intravenous drug abusers could become infected with HIV. Strange as it may seem patients who contracted HIV through sharing needles looked down on patients who were infected through gay sex, and vice versa. Why waste time on useless comparisons, was my thought. In the 1980s, being HIV-positive was a death sentence. Even in the mid-1990s AIDS was one of the leading causes of death. Nurses knew they could be infected through contaminated blood on needles.

Now safety needles don’t have to be recapped after use but during the first part of the AIDS epidemic, nurses in my hospital recapped dirty needles and placed them in boxes covered with a metal grid. Sometimes needles stuck out of these grids. We stored dirty needle boxes in the dirty utility room until they were removed by housekeeping during the night. When I worked nights, I knew drug abusers found one of the many unguarded entrances into the hospital and stole dirty needle boxes. No wonder HIV spread quickly.

Despite my initial introduction to AIDS through gay patients infected with HIV, I don’t believe a god reached down to zap homosexuals for their coming out parties and parades. From the sixties onwards many people changed their sexual behaviors. Today, some of these behaviors would be called risky but they started before HIV and AIDS were household words. In the late 1980s I worked with a nurse who used to say, “Look what the hippy generation gave us with their drug use and sex orgies.”

So where did HIV come from? Sex, drugs, and rock and roll? It’s too easy to say it started with gay men and came out of Africa.

A scientist, Simon Wain-Hobson, in the Pasteur Institute in France reported that a blood sample drawn in 1959 in the then Belgian Congo showed evidence of HIV infection (Wain-Hobson, Simon. (1998). 1959 and all that: Immunodeficiency viruses. NATURE, 391, 531-533). A nurse working in a fever hospital in Johannesburg in 1959 reported a few patients with sores arriving at the hospital from Central Africa. The hospital could do nothing to cure the patients and they returned home to die. When the hospital contacted a mission station in the Belgian Congo, hospital employees found out that chimps and monkeys in the area were hunted and eaten but one monkey, gray with a green sheen on its coat, was venerated because its sheen was thought to give the monkey mystic powers. (Kirk, Polly. (1999, May). How AIDS began: A Nurse’s Account (Letter to the editor). London DAILY TELEGRAPH). Does this mean that people in Central Africa shared needles or had sex with green monkeys in order for a simian virus to jump species? Maybe people were infected from monkey blood when they hunted or took care of monkeys.

Dr Alan Cantwell in his article, “The Secret Origin of AIDS and HIV: How scientists produced the most horrifying plague of all time – and then covered it up,” on the METARELIGION website, notes that the strain of HIV infecting gay men in the 1980s in the US was not the same as that found in Africa in 1959. He also reports that surgeons have been transplanting chimpanzee parts into humans for decades. The Special Virus Cancer Program (SVCP) had as its main mission the collection of various human and animal cancers from around the world and the growth of large amounts of cancer-causing viruses. HIV is a cancer-causing and immunosuppressive retrovirus. Some research animals had their immune systems suppressed. SVCP researchers adapted many animal viruses to human cells. Special attention was paid to primate viruses (the supposed African source of HIV). Monkeys, chimpanzees, mice, and cats were bred for research labs and virus-infected animals were shipped to labs in different countries. In some areas animals were re-introduced back into the wild. Lymphoma–producing viruses were introduced into several species of monkeys. Scientists isolated a Herpesvirus saimiri in monkeys that is genetically close to the Kaposi’s sarcoma virus seen in persons with AIDS.

DR Cantwell suggests in his article, “Is AIDS a man made virus,” published on the METARELIGION website, we might look into virus-contaminated vaccines as a possible cause of AIDS. In the 1970s the hepatitis B vaccine was developed in chimpanzees. It was made from the pooled blood of hepatitis-infected homosexuals. A few months after the vaccine was given to homosexuals in New York City, AIDS appeared in gay men in that city. Of those who volunteered for the hepatitis experiment in New York, 20% were discovered to be HIV-positive in 1980. The most common strain of HIV seen in gay men is rarely seen in Africa.

Medical research has produced miracles that saved lives. Vaccines save lives. Do we have to think of medical research as a gray area rather than all good? Being informed about methods used in research and its goals could help prevent runaway, unethical science. Consumers should know vaccines can be contaminated. I’m not going to rush out and insist that no animals be used in medical research but I’m not too happy learning about what happened to all the animals used in cancer research. When the hospital where I worked offered all its workers the hepatitis B vaccine, one of the doctors said, “I wouldn’t take that. It’s made from the serum of homosexuals.” In 1986 and for the hospital staff, that wasn’t true. And maybe offered is the wrong word. It was more, “We advise you to take the hepatitis B shots because, if you don’t, you’re on your own if you get infected with the disease through a needle stick.”

There is no vaccine for HIV/AIDS. Now testing positive for HIV doesn’t mean that a person is soon going to die but there is no cure. The public needs to know what behaviors put them at risk for HIV infection. A person who thinks he or she might have been infected should be tested and treated if positive as soon as possible. Counselors and practitioners are available to teach HIV-positive patients about their illness and how they can stay as healthy as possible.

Blaming a specific group or a nation for AIDS makes no sense. I don’t believe as Dr. Cantwell suggests in his METARELIGION articles that scientists and the government are involved in a cover up of the origin of HIV. Now, in their labs, many scientists are spending most of their waking hours searching for causes and cures. That is what they do. I’d guess most of them don’t want to be involved in cover ups, swindles, or anything else that would take them away from their work. Researchers tend not to reveal information before it has been checked and double-checked hundreds of times. And even when there is cause for hope, they tend to reveal slowly what might turn out to be science fiction. Not for them the leap from the bath tub and the naked run through the streets shouting, Eureka. Increasing our knowledge might help a lot of people in many nations but blaming does less than nothing.