Bloodborne HIV: Don't Get Stuck!

Protect yourself from bloodborne HIV during healthcare and cosmetic services

Category Archives: iatrogenic

More junk science underestimating HIV from medical injections

1 Comment Posted by on June 16, 2014

AIDS experts still haven’t figured out what is different about Africa that can explain why HIV epidemics there are so much worse than elsewhere. The continuing failure to find what is different exposes persistent (intentional or natural) incompetence on the part of respected researchers.

Specifically, scores of studies that have tested, followed, and retested hundreds of thousands of HIV-negative Africans to find when and how they get HIV have failed to trace the source of observed new infections.[1] Without tracing the source, there is no way to say infections came from sex – but “HIV from sex” is nevertheless the conclusion (and racist slur) from decades of incompetent, incomplete research. When such studies find people with new HIV infections who report no possible sexual exposure to HIV, researchers characteristically reject the evidence: “hmmmm, an African with HIV…must have lied about sexual behavior….”

With that “scientific” method, the US National Institutes of Health and UK’s Medical Research Council could save money by paying researchers sitting in offices in Baltimore, US, or Oxford, UK, to make up data to fit pre-determined conclusions. That would be more efficient than paying them to go to Africa, collect data, and then reject what doesn’t fit desired conclusions.

While funders have avoided funding good science to explain Africa’s HIV epidemics – for 30 years and counting – they have been all too happy to fund junk science that will get the desired results. One popular junk-science strategy to get desired results has been to model Africa’s HIV epidemic with unreliable parameters and weak, selected, or made-up data.

The latest paper by Pepin and colleagues[2] falls into that category of junk science – presenting a model with unreliable parameters and data, and using results from the model to claim that unsafe medical injections accounted for less than 1% of new HIV infections in Africa in 2010 (8,000-16,000 from injections vs. 1.9 million total new infections[3]).

Several obvious problems with the estimate are as follows:

1. Pepin’s assumed rate of HIV transmission through a contaminated syringe or needle – 1 in 150-300 injections – is far too low to allow observed HIV outbreaks through health care in Russia, Romania, Libya, and elsewhere. If those outbreaks occurred – they did! – then Pepin’s proposed rate of HIV transmission through injections is misleadingly low. For example, in Russia in 1988-89 hospital procedures passed from HIV from 1 child to more than 260 children in 15 months. Most transmissions in this outbreak came from children who had been infected less than 6 weeks earlier – enough time for infected children to get dozens but not 150-300 skin-piercing procedures followed by reuse of unsterilized instruments.[4]

2. Pepin’s same model estimates 4,300-8,500 new hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections in Africa from unsafe injections in 2010, less than 1% of estimated new HCV infections (cf: an estimated 18 million Africans were living with HCV in 2005[5], which corresponds to approximately 1 million new infections per year). Because virtually all new HCV infections come from blood, not sex, it’s likely that unsafe injections account for a lot more than 1% of new HCV infections – and by extension, more than 1% of new HIV infections as well. Furthermore, other skin-piercing procedures aside from injections likely account for a lot of new HCV infections – and by extension a lot of new HIV infections as well.

3. Pepin’s estimates distract from facts that need answers. Why do 16%-31% of HIV-positive children in Mozambique, Swaziland, and Uganda, have HIV-negative mothers (among children with tested mothers)?[6] Why do so many mutually monogamous couples find that one or both partners are HIV-positive?

In his conclusion, Pepin commendably recognizes “other modes of iatrogenic transmission” including[2]: “use of multi-dose medication vials, phlebotomies with re-used needles, dental care with improper sterilisation of instruments, unscreened transfusions, ritual scarifications and circumcisions performed by traditional practitioners… Better measurement of such exposures and of their impact on viral dynamics is an essential first step…”

Even so, Pepin does not hit the nail on the head. What is required to measure the “impact [of such procedures] on viral dynamics” is to trace HIV infections to their source. When infections are traced a hospital, dental clinic, tattooist, etc, then continue with outbreak investigations to determine the extent of the damage from unsafe health care or other skin-piercing procedure.

References

1. Gisselquist. Randomized controlled trials for HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa: Untraced infections, unasked questions, and unreported data. Available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1940999 (accessed 14 June 2014).

2. Pepin et al. Evolution of the global burden of viral infections from unsafe medical injections, 2000-2010. PLOS one 2014; 9: 1-8. Available at: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0099677 (accessed 14 June 2014).

3. Annex table 9 in: UNAIDS. Global HIV/AIDS Response: Epidemic update and health sector progress towards Universal Access, progress report 2011. Available at: http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2011/9789241502986_eng.pdf?ua=1 (accessed 15 June 2014).

4. See: http://dontgetstuck.org/russia-cases-and-investigations/

5. Hanafiah et al. Global epidemiology of hepatitis C virus infection. Hepatitis 2013. Available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hep.26141/pdf (accessed 14 June 2014).

6. See pages for Mozambique, Swaziland, and Uganda at: http://dontgetstuck.org/cases-unexpected-hiv-infections/; see also: https://dontgetstuck.wordpress.com/cases-unexpected-hiv-infections/).

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , , , , , , , , ,

HIV in Namibia: What You Don’t Seek, You Won’t Find

Comments Off on HIV in Namibia: What You Don’t Seek, You Won’t Find Posted by on June 13, 2014

There was no mention of HIV in Namibia’s 1992 Demographic and Health Survey and AIDS was only mentioned in passing. HIV prevalence had more than doubled since 1990, from 1.2% to 2.6%. But by 2000, when their second DHS was carried out, prevalence is estimated to have reached 14%, five times higher in less than a decade. So what areas of HIV had Namibia addressed during this time? The following table is from the 2000 DHS (p155, Table 11.1) :

Ways to avoid HIV/AIDS Women Men
Does not know AIDS or if it can be avoided 7.9 4.0
Believes no way to avoid 4.0 2.3
Does not know specific way 0.3 0.0
Abstain from sex 34.7 40.5
Use condoms 80.9 87.0
Have only one sexual partner 31.0 28.5
Avoid multiple partners 7.4 10.5
Avoid sex with prostitutes 1.0 3.3
Avoid sex with persons who have many partners 1.6 2.5
Avoid sex with homosexuals 0.2 0.3
Avoid blood transfusions 1.3 1.0
Avoid injections 0.8 0.6
Avoid sex with IV drug users 0.6 0.5
Avoid sharing razors/blades 2.2 2.6
Other including avoiding kissing/mosquito bites/traditional healer 1.8 1.6
Total 6,755 2,954

Aside from over 80% of people knowing about using condoms against HIV, which is good, knowledge about other ways of avoiding infection, even sexually transmitted HIV, ranges from poor to negligible. But the fact that less than 1% of people know that unsafe injections can transmit HIV is extremely worrying, considering risks from unsafe injections was well known at this time. More people are aware of the risk of transmission from razor blades than the risk of blood transfusions.

Even Jacques Pepin, who strenuously denies a significant role for unsafe healthcare in high HIV prevalence African countries, admits that 5% of HIV may have been transmitted via these routes globally in 2000, which means the contribution must have been far higher in countries with low safety standards and high HIV transmission rates, such as Namibia. Strangely, Pepin claims that safety in health facilities has improved so much in the ten years from 2000 to 2010 that “unsafe injections caused between 16,939 and 33,877 HIV infections” globally in 2010.

It is not very clear where Pepin got all his figures to carry out this estimate but there were an estimated 1.6m new HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa in 2012 (compared to 2.6m in 2001). Does it seem credible that something in the region of 1.5% of all new infections globally (33,877 as a percentage of 2.3m new infections in UNAIDS’ 2013 Global Report), at the most, were transmitted through unsafe injections? It sounds like Pepin was trying to find a figure that concurs with UNAIDS’ Modes of Transmission Analyses, which have been claiming that the contribution of unsafe injections in African countries has been at that very low level since they started carrying out these analyses.

The Modes of Transmission model is so flawed that it overestimates heterosexual HIV transmission by several hundred percent, leaving the majority of transmissions unexplained. Therefore, their minute figure for transmission through reused syringes and other forms of unsafe healthcare could not possibly be correct, and seems to have been arrived at by overestimating heterosexual transmission and then claiming that only the remaining infections, a very small percentage, could be a result of unsafe healthcare.

Neither Pepin nor UNAIDS appear to have bothered investigating conditions in health facilities, possible outbreaks of healthcare transmitted HIV, infections among people who have never had sex, infections among people who only engage in ‘safe’ sex, infections in mothers who may have been infected by their infants and infections in infants whose mothers are HIV negative. If Pepin comes up with the same sort of figure as UNAIDS then his model is likely to be as flawed as theirs.

Namibia’s 2006-07 DHS finds that knowledge about ‘unsafe’ sex is high but this has had little impact on sexual behavior, nor on HIV transmission. So, no surprise there. The report blandly states that “HIV is transmitted among adults primarily through heterosexual contact between an infected partner and a non-infected partner” (which is what all DHS reports say, along with UNAIDS and other international institutions).

Report after report comes out on ‘knowledge, attitude and practices’ (KAP) from high prevalence country after country, and various well funded national and international institutions never seem to wonder if reducing HIV transmission is not merely about how much people know about sex, their attitudes towards sexual transmission and their sexual practices. For how long can this go on?

There’s a small amount of data in the 2006-07 DHS about whether people had medical injections and whether they remember if the person administering the injection saw the injecting equipment being taken out of a new packet, but there are no corresponding figures for HIV prevalence in relation to receipt of medical injections. It is concluded that most public and private facilities, at least 90%, practice safe injections, but that the lowest level of safe injections was found for women attending some types of private facility, at 49%; not so reassuring.

Figures for the next DHS (2013) are not yet available, but from the list of data being collected there doesn’t seem to be any new attention paid to non-sexual transmission of HIV, especially through injecting equipment reuse and other forms of unsafe healthcare. If you don’t investigate, you don’t need to deny finding the incriminating figures. This has worked for UNAIDS, but not for Namibia, or for any other country with serious HIV epidemics.

[For more about HIV from unsafe healthcare, visit our Healthcare Risks for HIV pages.]

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , , , , ,

Namibia: Lack of Healthcare or Lack of Healthcare Safety?

Comments Off on Namibia: Lack of Healthcare or Lack of Healthcare Safety? Posted by on June 12, 2014

An online Namibian newspaper article reports that “Women who experience violence in volatile abusive relationships face four times higher risk of contracting HIV“, following a study of the links between gender based violence and HIV.

HIV prevalence is currently estimated at 13.4% in Namibia, an upper middle income country with a GDP per capita of $8,191, but also a high level of economic inequality. Population density is one of the lowest in sub-Saharan Africa.

However, when it comes to antenatal care, 81% of deliveries take place in a health facility. The only country I found in the region that was higher than that was South Africa, at 91.4%, which has the highest number of people living with HIV in the world.

81.5% of deliveries are performed by a skilled provider in Namibia. What is probably the highest figure in Africa is that for Botswana, at 99%. But Botswana has the second highest HIV prevalence in the world, at 25%, compared to swaziland’s 26%.

HIV prevalence is higher among women than men in Namibia, at 58% of all infections, and this phenomenon is common to every African country. While domestic and gender based violence need to be addressed regardless of how high or low HIV prevalence is, these are just as abhorrent in rich countries with low HIV prevalence as they are in an upper middle income country with high HIV prevalence.

According to the latest Service Provision Assessment, there are some very serious lapses in infection control in Namibian health facilities, including shortages or unavailability of syringes and needles, soap and water, latex gloves and disinfectant.

So what about addressing safety in health facilities? The number of physicians, nurses and midwives per 10,000 is higher than in other countries in Africa. Some of the biggest differences between Namibia and other much lower prevalence countries is its wealth and it’s far higher levels of access to health services. It is unlikely to be lack of healthcare that results in such high HIV prevalence, but rather lack of safe healthcare.

There is simply no evidence that HIV is ‘mainly driven by heterosexual sex’, the mantra that UNAIDS and the HIV industry have stuck to for so long. Prevalence in Namibia has increased from 1.2% in 1990 to reach a peak of at least 15.3% in 2007, but it has barely fallen since then. It’s time to abandon the sexual behavior fallacy and investigate non-sexual HIV transmission through unsafe healthcare, traditional and cosmetic practices.

[To read more about HIV transmission through unsafe healthcare, have a look at the Don’t Get Stuck With HIV site’s Healthcare Risks for HIV pages.]

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , , ,

Mass Male Circumcision: Cultural Imperialism and ‘Public Health’

2 Comments Posted by on June 11, 2014

“Three-quarters of women interviewed in Kenya’s highest prevalence province say they prefer circumcised partners” screams the headline. Except that only 30 women were interviewed.

There’s a whole rash of articles in praise of circumcision on the PLOS ONE site (Public Library of Science) that I simply don’t have the time or energy to read. Articles about how wonderful the operation is in reducing HIV transmission from females to males (not the other way, though) don’t appear to have found anything new in all the years they have been coming out. That is, aside from different ways of exaggerating the very small level of protection circumcision may afford men, other things being equal.

Women interviewed also believed, incorrectly, that circumcised men are ‘more hygienic and cleaner’. I wonder what would lead to them believing such a thing? Many people believe that a woman must wash herself after (and sometimes before) sex to be ‘more hygienic’, yet it has been known for some time that this is not only untrue, but that ‘vaginal douching’ increases the risk of infection with HIV. The same is true of male genital douching, but it was circumcision enthusiasts who established this, so they are not in a hurry to disabuse people of this dangerous myth.

It is hard not to see the push for circumcision, which comes almost entirely from the US, as highly stigmatizing and culturally imperialistic. It sounds as if men (and women), who in this instance belong to a non-circumcising tribe, are being told that Luo men are dirty because they are uncircumcised and that, since HIV is almost always transmitted through unsafe sexual behavior in Africa (a popular HIV industry myth), this ‘lack of hygiene’ is caused by not being circumcised. All they have to do is submit to circumcision and everything will be fine.

The branding of Luos as unclean and unhygienic by Western health practitioners is no less despicable than the views of other Kenyan tribes, who do practice circumcision, about Luos being ‘mere children’ and their leaders being ‘unfit to govern’ the country because they are uncircumcised. It is beliefs like this that have contributed to a lot of the ‘tribal’ violence Kenya has experienced, especially around election time. It seems the Western funded efforts to circumcise hundreds of thousands of Luos, perhaps millions, are not above using ‘tribalism’ to achieve their own ends.

Despite the small numbers, it is alarming that most of the women are said to express a ‘preference’ for circumcised men on the basis of beliefs that even the author accept are unproven: that circumcised men are ‘cleaner’ or ‘more hygienic’, that it takes them longer for them to ejaculate and that they ‘perform better’. Especially as the number who have ‘true’ beliefs, ones propagated by those promoting circumcision, is a lot smaller.

Is this kind of ‘demand creation’, based on complete lies, acceptable just because those doing the highly aggressive promotion claim that circumcision is effective at reducing HIV transmission from women to men (the absolute reduction being about 1.3%)? Or is it completely unacceptable, not because the reduction is very small, or because the randomized trials constantly referred to are highly suspect, but because this is a crude piece of cultural imperialism dressed up as a public health program?

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , , , ,

HIV Transmission Via Unsafe Medical Injections in Kenya – Significant Risk

3 Comments Posted by on June 11, 2014

Congratulations to Kenya on being one of the first African countries with a serious HIV epidemic to investigate the role of unsafe healthcare and reuse of injecting equipment in transmitting HIV. The study finds that “Men who had received ≥1 injection in the past 12 months (adjusted odds ratio, 3.2; 95% CI: 1.2 to 8.9) and women who had received an injection in the past 12 months, not for family planning purposes (adjusted odds ratio, 2.6; 95% CI: 1.2 to 5.5), were significantly more likely to be HIV infected compared with those who had not received medical injection in the past 12 months.”

But these findings make the conclusion of the article all the more striking: “Injection preference [my emphasis] may contribute to high rates of injections in Kenya.” If someone is infected with HIV as a result of receiving an injection, then it is the behavior of the health care practitioner that is at fault, not the ‘preference’ of the patient. Health facilities make more money from procedures such as injections than they do from just giving advice or handing out prescriptions, so there may be good reasons why patients ‘prefer’ injections; they may have been led to believe that injections are ‘better’. I’d also be surprised if mere patient preference made much difference to the kind of treatment a patient received in Kenya or elsewhere in East Africa.

Those providing health services need to take responsibility for healthcare associated HIV transmission, and that includes Ministries of Health, professional bodies, and also the WHO, UNAIDS, CDC and other parties who have dominated health and HIV policy in high HIV prevalence countries for decades. Reuse of syringes, needles and other skin piercing equipment carries a very high risk of transmission of HIV, hepatitis and other pathogens. It is not enough to blame patients for their ‘preferences’. Practitioners can decide what treatment a patient needs and what is the best means of administering it, if that means is available to them.

The paper recommends that “community- and facility-based injection safety strategies be integrated in disease prevention programs”. If this is UN-speak for the need to accept that HIV is frequently transmitted through unsafe healthcare and these practices need to stop, then I wholeheartedly agree. This is more than thirty years too late, but it’s good to hear the very mention of non-sexually transmitted HIV in the form of unsafe healthcare being taken seriously in a peer-reviewed journal. I look forward to hearing of other high HIV prevalence countries making the same ‘discovery’ and publicizing it, and also taking steps to reducing such transmission risks.

[To read more about HIV transmission through unsafe healthcare, have a look at the Don’t Get Stuck With HIV site’s Healthcare Risks for HIV pages.]

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , , , , ,

GlaxoSmithKline: “How Modern Clinical Trials are Carried Out”

Comments Off on GlaxoSmithKline: “How Modern Clinical Trials are Carried Out” Posted by on June 10, 2014

“We would need further details to investigate what actually took place, but the practices outlined certainly don’t reflect how modern clinical trials are carried out. We conduct our trials to the same high scientific and ethical standards, no matter where in the world they are run.”

That’s a comment from a GlaxoSmithKline spokesperson following the discovery of mass graves of an estimated 800 children in Ireland, who are thought to have died while taking part in ‘secret’ clinical trials, for which there is no evidence informed consent was ever given. That’s a huge number of deaths, by any standards. It is to be wondered how many deaths (and injuries) it took before the trials were stopped.

It would be nice to think that the GSK spokesperson is right, that such things could never happen today. But there’s a whole list of unethical practices in Wikipedia that GSK have been involved in, and those are just the more recent cases. And what about their current collaboration with the Gates Foundation to develop a malaria vaccine? Such a vaccine would be a godsend, but who is keeping an eye on them, given their record?

I don’t doubt that such things no longer happen in Ireland, nor in other Western countries. But unethical practices in African countries are certainly not a thing of the past.

The Don’t Get Stuck With HIV site has a section on DepoProvera (DMPA) hormonal contraceptive, which evidence suggests may increase infection with HIV among those using, and onward transmission by those using the method. Also on this site David Gisselquist has written about the unethical behavior of health professionals who have failed to investigate or act in any way on evidence that infants and adults may have been infected with HIV through unsafe healthcare.

WHO have been dragging their feet over unsafe healthcare, especially unsafe injections through reuse of injecting equipment, use of DepoProvera in HIV endemic countries and various non-sexual modes of HIV transmission. There are also the mass male circumcision campaigns, which are based on lies about research that was carried out in Kenya, South Africa and Uganda. It has never been explained how people who seroconverted during these trials were infected with HIV, it was just claimed that they must have had unsafe sex. Though many of the men did not have any obvious sexual risks, non-sexual risks were not considered, including the circumcision operation itself.

The list of serious ethical breeches goes on. Some participants taking part in the circumcision trials were not told they were infected with HIV, and were followed to see how long it would take for them to infect their partners, who also weren’t told they were at risk. This resembles the Tuskegee and Guatemala Syphilis ‘Experiments‘, which also ended in the 1960s. Yet mass male circumcision campaigns are ongoing and extremely well funded, despite not having anything like the rate of takeup anticipated by those making a lot of money from carrying out the operations.

There has been some secrecy surrounding DepoProvera, and a lot of data about mass male circumcision may have been collected but never released, but much of the data about these issues is readily available to anyone with an internet connection. Like the results of the Irish trials, much of the research was published in “prestigious medical journals”. But I assume this is not what GSK is referring to when they talk about ‘modern clinical trials’?

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , , ,

Age-disparate relationships do not drive HIV in young women. KwaZulu-Natal, SA

Comments Off on Age-disparate relationships do not drive HIV in young women. KwaZulu-Natal, SA Posted by on June 9, 2014

I commented on this back in March when it was reported at a conference. Now the paper has been published (though it is not available free of charge). It concludes: “In this rural KwaZulu-Natal setting with very high HIV incidence, partner age-disparity did not predict HIV acquisition amongst young women. Campaigns to reduce age-disparate sexual relationships may not be a cost-effective use of HIV-prevention resources in this community.”

The HIV industry likes to believe that, although HIV is almost always transmitted through ‘unsafe’ heterosexual sex in African countries, unlike in other countries, it is men’s behavior that is most responsible. This supports their ‘all men are bastards, especially older men, and all women are victims, especially younger women’ mentality.

It’s good timing. After 23 years of monitoring their epidemic in South Africa, HIV experts have seen HIV prevalence increase from less than 1% to almost 30% in that time, and stagnating at over 25% for about the last 10 years. KwaZulu-Natal is the worst affected province, with HIV prevalence in some districts reaching 40% among antenatal clinic attendees.

Perhaps a little less emphasis on sexual behavior and a little more emphasis on non-sexual risks, such as unsafe healthcare, traditional and cosmetic practices, may shed some light on what is driving the epidemic and why efforts to influence HIV transmission in any way seemed to have failed thus far.

[For more about non-sexual HIV transmission via unsafe healthcare, traditional and cosmetic practices, and how to protect yourself from these, have a look at some of our more detailed pages.]

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , ,

Infinite Regress of Expert Opinion On the Behavioral Myth of HIV in Africa

Comments Off on Infinite Regress of Expert Opinion On the Behavioral Myth of HIV in Africa Posted by on June 9, 2014

In an otherwise interesting article by Paul Sharp and Beatrice Hahn about the origins of HIV, the authors make a familiar, but poorly supported claim: that “AIDS is…primarily a sexually transmitted disease”. I always wonder if citations for such claims will actually present evidence, or if they just lead to a blind alley, eventually.

Sharp and Hahn cite a paper by Myron Cohen et al and one by Florian Hladik and M. Juliana McElrath. But Cohen et al only refer to Haldik and a lengthy report by UNAIDS from last year, which doesn’t cite any supporting evidence. It says: “The vast majority of people newly infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa are infected during unprotected heterosexual intercourse (including paid sex) and onward transmission of HIV to newborns and breastfed babies. Having unprotected sex with multiple partners remains the greatest risk factor for HIV in this region.”

This completes the mantra about 80% of HIV transmission being a result of heterosexual intercourse and much of the remaining being a result of mother to child transmission.

Hladik and McElrath refer to another report by UNAIDS, this time from 2007. Despite the constant repetition of an assumption about heterosexual transmission, I could not find any supporting citations. UNAIDS do frequently refer to their ‘Modes of Transmission’ surveys, but these are hopelessly flawed and do not support the assumption. Hladik et al decide that, although transmission via infected blood is possible such a phenomenon is beyond the scope of their review.

I could chase around and look at various UNAIDS publications that propagate what has become one of the most enduring myths about HIV transmission in Africa, that it is almost always a result of heterosexual sex, but there are too many such publications, and too many of them just cite other UNAIDS publications. One might hope for peer-reviewed articles, like the ones cited above, to break the vicious circle, the incestuous practice of experts citing other experts until they have created a web of questionable views that are then used to spawn global policies. But years of reading such documents has not led to any clear and independent assessment of the relative contribution of sexual and non-sexual modes of transmission to the most serious HIV epidemics. If I ever stumble upon such an assessment I shall certainly share it widely.

But I don’t believe evidence will ever be produced to show that sex explains almost all HIV transmission in Africa, not even from all the experts and senior bureaucrats who have made it their life’s work to cling to this view, because it simply is not true. There is too much evidence that HIV has been transmitted through unsafe healthcare and various other non-sexual routes. But UNAIDS have resolutely refused to investigate any of this evidence.

[For more about non-sexually transmitted HIV, view our Healthcare Risks for HIV and Cosmetic Risks for HIV pages. For more about some of the terrible consequences of adhering to this behavioral myth of HIV transmission in Africa, see our Male Circumcision and Depo-Provera (DMPA, hormonal birth control) pages.]

 

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , ,

Uganda: Mystery About Effectiveness of Circumcision Against HIV

Comments Off on Uganda: Mystery About Effectiveness of Circumcision Against HIV Posted by on June 7, 2014

The HIV industry’s circumcision division has put a lot of effort into denying that circumcised men may feel that they can safely engage in ‘risky’ sexual behaviors. But some peer reviewed articles have found that circumcised men feel that, being circumcised, they are not at risk of sexually transmitted HIV, or that their risk really is lower as a result of being circumcised.

The problem is, how do they know how circumcised and uncircumcised men become infected? They may believe the HIV industry’s mantra about almost all HIV transmission being a result of unsafe sex in African countries, but nowhere else. But what if the HIV industry is wrong? They have never checked. They have never traced people’s partners systematically or assessed their non-sexual risks, from unsafe healthcare, traditional and cosmetic practices, they have never investigated infections that were clearly not sexually transmitted.

The industry seems to feel that the end justifies the means because HIV prevalence has turned out to be lower among circumcised men in some circumstances. But if they don’t know how some men, circumcised and uncircumcised, became infected, how do they know that circumcision protects them? If circumcision is associated with higher HIV prevalence in some countries and lower prevalence in other countries, perhaps circumcision status is irrelevant. Perhaps sexual behavior is irrelevant, the HIV industry just doesn’t know.

So millions of men are said to be lining up to be circumcised and they don’t know whether it will really protect them, whether it will increase their risk or whether it will have no effect at all. They also don’t know how safe conditions are in the clinic where the circumcision is carried out.

[For more about the ineffectiveness of Male Circumcision against HIV visit our circumcision related pages.]

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , , , ,

Control Element More Evident than Prevention in Uganda’s HIV Bill

Comments Off on Control Element More Evident than Prevention in Uganda’s HIV Bill Posted by on June 7, 2014

Another article on Uganda’s idiotic HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Bill says the country is going have a bill that compels men to test for HIV along with their partners when their partners are pregnant. I can see a lot of fatherhood denials resulting from this. But this bill, which claims to be punishing men (who all deserve to be punished, right?), will be a lot more threatening to women.

HIV prevalence is higher among women (8.3%) than men (6.1%) and women are already under a lot of pressure to be tested for HIV when pregnant. This means that a lot more women are aware of their status and it is unlikely they will be able to claim not to know their status if they have ever been pregnant, especially if they live in an urban area (urban prevalence 8.7%, rural 7%) and can afford some healthcare (richest quintile prevalence 8.2%, poorest quintile 6.3%).

Ugandan politicians are probably not aware of the terrible conditions in health facilities in their country as they and their families always seem to go abroad when they need healthcare. But they should be aware that health facilities there, especially reproductive health facilities, may be dangerous places. A very expensive survey is carried out every now and again called the Service Provision Assessment and they should familiarize themselves with it. Almost all Ugandan women attend an antenatal facility at least once, and more than half give birth in a health facility and receive the assistance of a skilled health professional.

Given such conditions in healthcare facilities, maybe Ugandan politicians should make sure HIV and other diseases are not being transmitted through healthcare and other skin-piercing procedures before passing a bill that seems to assume that transmission is all a result of unsafe sex. They don’t seem to have any idea of the possible consequences of such a bill.

[There have been quite a number of HIV infections in Uganda that have been unexplained by sexual behavior and are probably healthcare related. To read more, visit our Cases and Investigations page for Uganda.]

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →