rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (11/14/85)
Subject: AIDS in Africa: some info from an editorial Newsgroups: net.motss,net.med Well, here's a hastily reproduced editorial that appeared in this morning's Boston Globe (11/14/85); I don't know how accurate it is. Sexual transmission of AIDS in Africa is virtually entirely hetero- sexual, a point the editorial fails to make. Here's the full text of the editorial (from page 22): "The worst news is yet to come about AIDS. Even as the American public takes some reassurance from the limited transmission of the diease here, reports emerging from some African countries are ominous." "Coupled with a newer understanding of the AIDS virus as an insidious infection of the brain as well as the body [varying degrees of dementia, resulting from brain damage, have been found among up to 1/3 of US AIDS victims, especially during the disease's final stages], the reports make the disease even more calamitous." [This is an exaggeration: the AIDS virus' affinity for nerve cells has been suspected or known for at least a couple of years, and the findings on dementia have been out for half a year or more; this isn't new information]. "What had been suspected in central and east Africa now is confirmed: AIDS is rampant. One-tenth of the residents are infected by the virus; at least half will become sick." [Whether "sick" means ARC only or full- blown AIDS, it didn't say. At most 10% (at least, a fraction of a %)) of Americans carrying HTLV-III are expected to eventually contract full- blown AIDS; the much higher ratio projected for Africa is attributed to poor health and sanitary conditions, certain folk practices involving blood, etc.] "They number more than 10 million people, five times as many in the far more populous United States. There is less reason to think the spread of AIDS can be slowed in Africa, although it may be in the United States." "Last summer, two American medical scientists Drs. Bruce Johnson and Charles Oster of the Kenya National Research Institute, expressed anxiety over the heavy seeding-in of the AIDS virus." "Blood donations indicated that a 10-15 percent of Kenya's population carried the virus. A blood screening of 90 Nairobi prostitutes showed that half were infected and that 3 out of 4 [of those infected] had symptoms. A sampling of the 250,000-member Turkana tribe showed that two out of three were AIDS-positive." [Ie, had positive responses to bloodtests for the suspected AIDS virus.] "Although Kenya lists only 3 official cases of AIDS, the doctors had heard through colleagues that a lethal new sickness was wide- spread in neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. They fear that it is only a matter of time until it moves into Kenya and other countries. It is known as the `slim disease' because its victims waste away and die. The doctors suspected it was a new form of AIDS." "They were right." "Now reports in the British medical journal The Lancet show that slim diease is an African version of AIDS. Its spread into Uganda--both to rural villages and the capital, Kampala--is linked to traveling traders and troops from Tanzania, which borders on the south. The prostitutes tested in Nairobi were migrants from Tanzania, where nothing is known about the status of AIDS." "The AIDS outbreak is no less dismal in Rwanda and Zaire. As early as 1983, a higher rate of acute AIDS cases was detected in Zaire's capital city, Kinshasa, than in New York or San Francisco. In Rwanda AIDS cases in children are 15 times higher than in the United States." "Up to half the hospital beds in Kinshasa are reported to be occupied by AIDS-infected patients. Twenty percent of the pediatric beds in Kigali hold children with slim disease. Since the AIDS virus can be passed from mother to child during pregnancy and breast-feeding, the high birthrate in Africa compounds the AIDS problem." "In Africa, as in Haiti, AIDS occurs almost equally in men and women. The disease seems to be spread in the same ways that it is in the US -- sexually and through contaminated blood." "Opportunities for transmitting the AIDS virus in Africa are believed to be enhanced, however, by certain practices. Injections are commonly given by folk-medicine practitioners who reuse unsterile needles. Cutting the skin is another folk-medicine practice, and the blade is reused. Tribal circumcision rites, piercing of the ear, nose and lip, and ritual scarring are often performed under unsanitary conditions." "Beyond that, the miserable overcrowdedness `in which the bulk of the people live, combined with a high frequency of infections, injuries and sores which break the skin, make blood contact among family members practically inevitable, with the transmission of the virus likely,' says Dr. John Seale, an AIDS specialist and researcher in London." "In an editorial in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Seale emphasizes the singularly dangerous threat posed by the AIDS virus over the next decade, as a `slow, irreversible and cumulative' brain infec- tion. Bescause the virus persists for life, `it would produce a self- sustaining epidemic.'" "`Indeed,' wrote Seale, `it would produce a lethal pandemic throughout the crowded cities and villages of the Third World of a magnitude un- paralleled in human history. That is what the AIDS virus is now doing.'" [According to Dr. Seale, that is. The neurological effect of AIDS is not new information; I haven't heard such apocalyptic predictions from other AIDS researchers.] "The specter of an AIDS catastrophe looms over Africa, driving home the desperate need to find an effective treatment and making urgent the call for a US research effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project. Not a moment can be lost." [Lots of luck communicating this sense of urgency to Reagan and Reaganoids!] Now, don't get hysterical: it solves nothing, and besides, it's bad form, Cheers, Ron Rizzo
caf@omen.UUCP (Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX) (11/17/85)
In article <1609@bbncca.ARPA> rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) writes: >"The specter of an AIDS catastrophe looms over Africa, driving home >the desperate need to find an effective treatment and making urgent >the call for a US research effort on the scale of the Manhattan >Project. Not a moment can be lost." [Lots of luck communicating >this sense of urgency to Reagan and Reaganoids!] I recall recent comments by Soviet officials about how the USSR has nearly solved the problem of health care for the masses. If Reagan isn't receptive to the AIDS situation,, perhaps we could get the Soviets to divert some of their resources from their Star Warski military buildup to AIDS research. "AIDS: The One population control method not condemmed by Right To Life groups" -- Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX ...!tektronix!reed!omen!caf CIS:70715,131