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LEMON-AIDS
BY PETER KURTH (published 07.20.04)
 
Lemons. Lemons? Could anyone have imagined it would be
that simple?
I’m
talking about the tiny bit of actual, practical, graspable treatment
news that managed to escape the maelstrom of the 15th International AIDS
Conference in Bangkok, Thailand last week – a conference that
otherwise was given over almost entirely to criticism of U.S. AIDS policy under George W. Bush. The biannual summit of doctors,
scientists, health-care workers, activists, politicians, patients and
government officials is the largest of its kind in the world, the Mother of
all AIDS gatherings, and this year Mother gave Bush and the boys a good
whack with the paddle.
I’ll
get back to that in a minute, but first – the lemons. It seems that a scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, Dr. Roger Short, has discovered that lemon juice
-- plain, old, ordinary lemon juice – “kills the AIDS virus in
the lab.” The government of Thailand, on Short’s recommendation, is now funding
clinical trials to see if it can kill it in you, too.
I
say “you” in the generic sense, not assuming that anyone
reading this is HIV-positive, as I am and have been for more than 20
years. I never expected to live this
long, never mind in such good health as I’ve got. I also never expected that citrus –
a little Florida Sunshine, as that old fag-baiter Anita Bryant used to say
– might be the answer for us all.
But
things have changed mightily over the last two decades. The International AIDS Conference is
normally awaited eagerly by doctors and patients alike for whatever
information it can give about advanced treatment strategies; until 1996, at
least, with the advent of protease inhibitors and combination therapy, this
was the only thing on anyone’s mind.
Now, however, with patients who can afford the medications living
longer and healthier lives, and with HIV itself spreading faster than ever
across the globe, the focus has shifted from treatment to money and the
best way to spend it – so much so that this year’s conference,
entitled “Access for All,” saw the worst science attendance of
any summit before it, with the United States cutting its delegation by
almost three-quarters on the order of Health and Human Services Secretary
Tommy Thompson.
So,
faute de mieux, they’re
going to try the lemon-squeeze on humans.
According to The Age in Melbourne, “at least 400 Thai men and women”
have bravely volunteered to pucker up for science. Dr. Short’s experiments have
already shown that “a solution of 20 per cent lemon juice reduced
viral loads in the lab by 90 per cent”; that it also kills syphilis,
gonorrhea and chlamydia; and that “when he
put lemon juice in a test tube with HIV-positive sperm, the sperm were
permanently immobilized within 30 seconds.”
My
guess is a good shot of lemon juice would “immobilize” sperm
with or without HIV, and that a lot of women tired of the pill or the
diaphragm might want to start keeping it next to their beds. But, for the moment, it’s going to
be tested only as a means to prevent infection – in other words,
don’t go injecting yourself with it. “Thai women taking part in the test
will soak a sponge in lemon juice and insert it before sex,” The Age reports, while Thai men, presumably, will keep doing what
they’ve always done. `Twas ever thus in the world of sexual responsibility.
“The
potential of this is huge,” says a spokesman for the new project,
which is called – try not to laugh, please – LemonAIDS.
“If it proves to be effective, it would be wonderful.”
Yes,
it would. It would be the kind of
easy, accessible, goddamn flippin’ miracle
we on the fighting lines of AIDS have been waiting for for
years. On the other hand, if the
juice actually works as a prophylactic, and if all the other reports from Bangkok this year can be taken as a guide, the giant
pharmaceuticals will be patenting lemons in no time, and you’ll be
paying $3000 a pop for them at the supermarket next year.
Call
me cynical, but I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet. Just consider the statistics: Twenty million people around the world
have already died from HIV infection; 2.9 million of them died last year;
8,000 of them will die in the next 24 hours. An estimated 37.8 million people
worldwide are still living with the virus, with new infections clocking in
at the rate of 14,000 a day. The
United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that $12
billion will be needed next year for worldwide treatment and prevention
efforts, twice what is currently being spent. Give it two more years and $20 billion
will be needed for the same thing.
It
gets worse. “The face of
HIV/AIDS is now that of a woman, and a young woman at that,” says
Terri Bartlett, vice-president for public policy at Population Action
International in Washington, D.C. Young
people – 15- to 24-year-olds -- account for nearly half of all new
HIV infections worldwide. In parts
of Africa, 25 percent of all women are infected by the time
they are 22. “In Kenya and Zambia, adolescents who are married are becoming
infected faster than sexually active unmarried teens,” because, in so
many cultures, sexual fidelity is expected and demanded only of wives.
Even
in the United
States,
where the worst sort of health care is likely to be better than what
you’ll find in most of the developing world, and where programs are
well established both to help prevent and help treat HIV disease, the rate
of new infections among women is exploding faster than all efforts to keep
up with it. Among newly infected
persons in the U.S., one in four is now a woman. And still the Bush administration, under
the guise of “family values” and “compassionate
conservatism,” promotes “abstinence” rather than
proven prevention techniques as a means of combating the epidemic.
True,
back in June, George W. Bush was finally persuaded to utter the word "condom"
before “a church-affiliated group” in Philadelphia. Eighteen
months after it was first announced, the president’s much-touted, $15
billion “Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief” (PEPFAR) has barely
left the ground, and then only with the provision that a full third of the
money be spent on “abstinence education” and other programs
that stress “chastity” over reality in this dreadful, ongoing
war.
“We
can learn from the experiences of other countries when it comes to a good
program to prevent the spread of AIDS,” Bush told the faith-based
Philly crowd, citing that great U.S. ally, Uganda, for its success with
“what they call the A.B.C. approach. … That stands for: Abstain, Be faithful in marriage, and, when
appropriate, use Condoms.” The
shock -- or risk -- of saying such a thing must have been so great that
Bush immediately added, “In addition to other kinds of prevention, we
need to tell our children that abstinence is the only certain way to avoid
contracting HIV.”
“Yes!”
someone shouted from the audience.
“It
works every time!” said Bush – whereupon the whole congregation
clapped and cried out, “Every time!” and “That’s
for sure!” before, no doubt, falling over backward and babbling in
tongues.
This
insane approach to AIDS prevention, while accurate on the surface, is
unsupported by any statistical evidence of success in the real world. Like it or not, the vast majority of
women on the planet aren't in a position to call the sexual shots --
"abstinence" is no option for a teenaged girl in South Africa, a
sex-worker in Thailand, a drug addict in Bucharest. And this was just one of the criticisms
leveled at the U.S. in Bangkok last week.
Another
concerned the Bushmen’s attempts to protect their friends (and huge
campaign donors) in the pharmaceutical industry. Last September, the World Health
Organization, in a landmark decision, ruled that “poor nations may
ignore registered patents in times of national health crises,” and,
since then, several among them have done exactly that, manufacturing
generic versions of AIDS medications and distributing them either free of
charge or at a greatly reduced cost.
Now,
in what one Bangkok critic calls “an astounding patchwork of cynicism
and pandering to special interests,'' the U.S. is working hard to negotiate
"bilateral trade agreements" with developing nations that, while
delivering all sorts of financial goodies to people in power, would also
require the reinstatement of the medical patents currently owned by Abbott
Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, etc. A statement read in Bangkok on behalf of French President Jacques Chirac
described this effort as “tantamount to blackmail,” and even
our staunchest “coalition” ally, Great Britain, has denounced it, at the same time declaring
that Britain will not play along in the
“abstinence” charade.
Worst
of all, Bush’s team still insists on taking a
“unilateral” approach to the AIDS crisis, refusing to donate
more than $200 million next year to the United Nation’s Global Fund
to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the brainchild of UN President Kofi Annan and a fund
designed to distribute AIDS money equitably and smoothly to all the
countries that need it.
No,
Bush will keep his $15 billion to himself, and only hand it out to
pre-selected nations, mainly in the Caribbean, that are “hard hit by the epidemic”
but also “amenable to American rules about where and how the money
will be spent.” In other
words, the Yanqui dollar will run the show. And in Bangkok, naturally enough, the civilized world was enraged.
You should be, too.
"Once
again, we have isolated ourselves from the global community," says
Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat and the only member of Congress to
vote against giving Bush unlimited war powers after the September 11
attacks. Lee has introduced a new
bill in Congress -- the “New U.S. Global HIV Prevention Strategy to
Address the Needs of Women and Girls Act” – which recognizes
that “women and girls are often powerless to abstain from sex, ensure
their partner's faithfulness or insist on condom use even within
marriage.” Lee notes, correctly, “that condoms are
the only [preventative] technology available right now to deal with the
pandemic."
Tell
it to the Bush boys -- please, at the polls this November. As with every other aspect of their
disgraceful regime, they’re in it for the gold.
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