Alternative Ideas Regarding Causation, Origin or Treatment
See also: AIDS denialism See also: AIDS in Africa- The Duesberg hypothesis promoted by biologist Peter Duesberg argues that AIDS is not caused by HIV, but rather that HIV is a harmless passenger virus, and that AIDS is caused by non-infectious agents like illegal drug usage. The scientific consensus is that the Duesberg hypothesis has been discredited.
- Thabo Mbeki, former President of South Africa, along with other prominent members of the ruling African National Congress party, has argued that AIDS is the result of poverty, chronic disease, malnutrition and other environmental factors. Mbeki based his views on the discredited beliefs of AIDS denialists, especially Peter Duesberg. It has been suggested that the ANC leadership adopted this position as a political expedient, intended to deflect criticism that the ANC had not done enough to fight AIDS in South Africa. In 2000, two statements by government spokespeople, (one later retracted), placed the financial cost of treating pregnant HIV positive women and the subsequent cost to the state of raising the child as central in the decision of whether to provide anti-retroviral drug treatment. Also in 2000, the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian reported that in a leaked text for a speech Mbeki was to give to an ANC caucus, Mbeki claimed that the CIA and Western drug companies were secretly promoting the view that HIV causes AIDS in order to increase sales of anti-HIV drugs.
Read more about this topic: AIDS Origins According To Denialists
Famous quotes containing the words alternative, ideas, origin and/or treatment:
“If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)