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Tag Archives: Uganda

UNAIDS: Still Chipping the Bank

1 Comment Posted by on October 11, 2017

How are we to make sense of a HIV epidemic such as the one in Uganda? We are told that it is mostly a result of ‘unsafe’ sex. But data about sexual behavior in Uganda is unremarkable; most people don’t engage in high levels of unsafe sex, and types of sexual behavior considered unsafe appear not to be so unsafe after all.

In 2007, it was estimated that there were almost one million people living with HIV, 135,000 newly infected with HIV in that year, and 77,000 deaths from Aids. The Demographic and Health Survey for Uganda in 2011 concluded that “Differences in HIV infection according to higher risk sexual activity are minor”.

In fact, the vast majority of the 18,000 people surveyed did not engage in sexual behavior considered to be risky. Most people had a maximum of one partner in the last 12 months, most who had more than one partner did not have concurrent (overlapping) partnerships, most did not report large numbers of lifetime partners, most didn’t pay for sex and most didn’t engage in ‘higher risk’ sex in the past 12 months.

So it’s hard to believe that the table appearing on page 15 of the Modes of Transmission Survey (MoT) for Uganda, for 2009, can be anything but fiction. It claims that almost 90% of HIV incidence is a result of multiple partnerships, partners of multiple partnerships and people engaged in mutually monogamous heterosexual relationships.

Even incidence attributed to sex workers doesn’t reach 1%, nor does that attributed to men who have sex with men, plus their female partners. Injecting drug use doesn’t play a big part in most of the epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa either.

The DHS figures for Uganda clearly do not support the MoT figures. They do not support the contention that high HIV prevalence indicates high rates of ‘unsafe’ sexual activity; HIV prevalence is high in Uganda, but sexual activity is not exceptional, nor is it closely associated with HIV transmission.

DHS continues: “HIV prevalence by the number of sexual partners in the 12 months before the survey does not show the expected patterns”. It is noted that “HIV prevalence shows the expected relationship with the number of lifetime sexual partners” but the author doesn’t mention that the numbers of people involved is very small. So they conclude that “it is important to remember that responses about sexual risk behaviours may be subject to reporting bias”.

Uganda was one of the first countries to expose itself to the scrutiny of the rapidly developing HIV industry, from the 1980s. As a result, a lot more studies took place there, a lot more papers were published about Uganda and tens of millions more dollars were spent there than in any other African country, even countries that later turned out to have far worse epidemics.

It takes more than a bit of fluffing to get from the Demographic and Health Survey’s flaccid data on sexual behavior to the conclusion that almost 90% of HIV transmission is a result of unsafe heterosexual sex. But if the industry doesn’t come clean about where the bulk of new infections are coming from, resources targeted at those thought to or claimed to engage in ‘unsafe’ sex will continue to be wasted.

behavioral paradigm, HIV, institutional racism ,

Choke on it: Peak Free Lunch at HIV Inc?

1 Comment Posted by on September 7, 2017

There have been several mentions recently of significant cuts in HIV funding, including PEPFAR and the Global Fund for Aids, TB and Malaria. It is said that funding could be cut by several billion dollars per annum, even as much as one third of all funding. Should we be worried?

According to UNAIDS, funding available for low and middle income countries has grown from $4.8 billion in 2000 to $19.5 billion in 2016. During that time, deaths from Aids have dropped from a peak of 1.9 million people in 2005 to 1 million in 2016.

The number of new infections has gone from about 4.7 million in 1995 to 1.8 million in 2016 and the number accessing treatment has gone from 685,000 people in 2000 to 19.5m people in 2016. The fear is that the number of deaths will cease to drop, or even increase, as the number of people on treatment flattens out or drops.

The gains over the last 15 years are certainly impressive, especially the increases in funding. But the correlation between increases in funding and improvements in HIV indicators is not so clear. Drops in rates of new infections had started many years before, and even death rates had peaked and started to decline before funds such as PEPFAR and GPATM would have had much impact.

In fact, figures for new transmissions in some high prevalence countries started to drop in the 80s (Uganda) and 90s (Kenya and Tanzania), long before big funding and large treatment programs were available. By the 2000s, several countries with serious epidemics were already seeing a substantial downward trend (Zimbabwe), with only an occasional upward blip, such as that experienced in Uganda.

Here are some ways that a lot more could be achieved with a lot less money:

  • Trace the possible source of every new infection; every new infection is potentially the source of more than one further infection, so failure to trace sources represents one of the biggest missed opportunities of the last 30 years of providing HIV services
  • Offer non-HIV healthcare services to those who test negative (as an incentive to testing), eg, free treatment for conditions other than HIV, including STIs
  • Re-examine the relative contributions of non-sexual and sexual infection routes for HIV, which must vary considerably from country to country, even within countries
  • Re-integrate HIV clinics and services into other health facilities, getting rid of expensive parallel HIV-specific structures
  • Distribute funding at a level closer to people on the ground, such as HIV positive people and those providing services
  • Re-direct some of the remaining funding to improving safety in certain service areas, eg, maternal health
  • ‘No blame’ investigations into serious outbreaks, especially among those whose risk should be low, eg, maternal health beneficiaries, virgins, infants, etc
  • Drop failing programs, such as abstinence-only and other behavioral programs that are aimed solely at sexual behavior
  • Listen to leaders who are calling for positive change, for things to be done differently, for a re-think of some of the strategies that have been failing for a long time

Big reductions in HIV funding could be used as an opportunity to make positive changes in the way the remaining funding is spent, and allow each dollar to go much further. Country leaders need to think differently, rather than chaining themselves to strategies that have been failing for years. Massive HIV NGOs and other institutions are too far removed from individual epidemics to be able to see differences between countries and within countries.

What we should worry about is stasis: static thinking in HIV institutions, static research focus in universities, static behavior in health facilities, static attitudes that have not moved on from the sensationalist finger-pointing of the 1980s. Static or falling funding is irrelevant so long as HIV spending remains independent of what’s happening on the ground. A radical drop in funding may bring about the very changes that have been wanting for decades.

AIDS, HIV, institutional racism, unsafe healthcare , , , , ,

Is that Guardian Article Really Racist?

1 Comment Posted by on August 30, 2017

Accusations of racism against the two journalists (Samuel Okiror and Hannah Summers) who put their names to an article entitled “‘Why are you having sex?’: women bear brunt of Uganda’s high HIV rate”, and even The Guardian itself, may sound unwarranted, insolent, even arrogant. Is The Guardian guilty of ‘deep racism in patologizing sex’?

No questions are raised about the long held assumption that HIV is ‘all about sex’. The authors seem to make the same assumption themselves. They don’t question people’s right to health information and to health education, which sex education is only a part of. These rights are very clearly stated in the World Medical Association’s Lisbon Declaration on the Rights of the Patient.

What about Uganda’s ban on sex education? The Guardian could have mentioned that, if they feel that this is so relevant to HIV. The tone and content of sex and sex education articles tend to be quite different when they are about sex in a UK or non-African context. Similarly with ‘Aids and HIV’. In the UK, people have a right to privacy, for example, but not in African countries, where a HIV positive diagnosis is assumed to indicate ‘unsafe’ sex, regardless of what the person may report.

The Guardian doesn’t wag its finger at adult men who have sex with adult men and tick them off about their ‘promiscuity’. But finger-wagging at adult men and women in high HIV prevalence countries in parts of Africa is routine, as if they are behaving like disobedient children. The Guardian doesn’t seem to notice these double standards.

The question ‘Why are you having sex? You should be married’? is said to be an instance of discrimination against young females who attempt ‘to access HIV prevention services from the health sector’. But the Ugandan health sector is shaped and funded by an international community that insists that HIV is all about sex. The ‘stigma’ to which the article alludes comes from the HIV community, from the media, from governments and international communities.

Why more young girls than young boys: “Health experts have attributed the disparity to the fact men tend to have more sexual partners, so a man with HIV would spread the infection to more people”. Aside from the logistics of that ‘expert’ opinion, it also seems to be based on the assumption that sex is usually instigated by men, with women usually being unwilling victims, that men are ‘more promiscuous’ than women, etc. Or perhaps those assumptions are totally absent?

While we are questioning differing prevalence rates by gender, what about some of the other figures gathered for Uganda and elsewhere (see Uganda Aids Indicator Survey, 2011 and others)? For example, why are there often large numbers of HIV positive virgins, who were not infected vertically? There have been cases of babies who seroconverted even though their mother were not infected. Some babies have infected their mothers, through breastfeeding. Many HIV positive women have one partner, who is seronegative.

There are so many discrepancies, aside from ones relating to sexual behavior, or appearing to. Why is high HIV prevalence clustered in just a few places in most countries (Kenya is a good example)? Why are rich people more likely than poor people to be infected? Why are employed people more likely to be infected than unemployed people? What difference does religious belief system make?

What is it about location, environment, economic circumstances, employment status and other factors that results in very high HIV prevalence in some countries, but not in others? The stock response from UNAIDS tends to be about differing ‘sexual mores’, differing sexual ‘mixing’ behavior in urban and rural areas, wealth inequalities (which result in more rich people paying for sex and more poor people engaging in paid sex, apparently), etc. It’s as if sexual behavior is the only determinant of HIV exposure and status, uniquely so among diseases, a complete epidemiological anomaly, and only in (some) African countries.

Instead of concentrating on sex alone, perhaps we could examine conditions in health facilities, and differing levels of access to health facilities, differing quality in health facilities, where only those with money, insurance, even transport and good infrastructure, can access? Some people are in a better position to protect themselves from non-sexual exposure to HIV, if only they also had access to accurate health information. Health funding, insurance and access will only improve health if it is high quality and safe healthcare.

The title and overall tone of the Guardian article concludes that ‘it’s all about sex’, before anything else appears. No argument is given for their conclusion. Asia Russell of Health GAP is right to warn that the figures are for prevalence, an indication of how many people are infected with HIV in a population or group. This is not as useful a measure as incidence, which estimates how many people were newly infected with HIV, usually in a period of one year.

But neither prevalence nor incidence figures are relevant to the content of the article because the factoids are either based on opinion, or they are commonly held assumptions (some would say ‘prejudices’). These include assumptions about ‘African’ sexuality, attitudes towards women, underage sex, intergenerational sex, ‘promiscuity’, sexual practices, ‘African’ masculinity, the status of women, etc.

The article is about The Guardian’s and its authors’ prejudices, not about Uganda, HIV or ‘Africans’. Presumably it contributes to, and also concurs with, the prejudices of Guardian readers, what they expect and perhaps enjoy reading about HIV, and sexual behavior in ‘Africa’.

The article does not draw attention to the fact that the health workers (ostensibly, those purveyors of (institutionalized) stigma and discrimination) make no mention of unsafe healthcare, ‘informal’ or unofficial healthcare, traditional healthcare and similar practices, cosmetic practices (such as tattooing) and others that could, however inadvertently, result in exposure to HIV contaminated blood.

At the end of the article we are told that the Ugandan health ministry has called for “concerted efforts from all stakeholders for scale-up of evidence-based interventions for sustainable HIV epidemic control”. But if those ‘evidence’ based interventions refer to the same prejudices and assumptions as the Guardian article, they will have no impact on transmission rates. What’s the point in scaling up interventions that have failed?

It’s the assumptions that are wrong, not the data. Prevalence rising or falling, incidence rising or falling, female rates higher or lower than male, none of these data can tell us how people are being infected with HIV. There is data suggesting that it’s not all about sex, but this is being ignored or reinterpreted.

The racism of The Guardian has disastrous consequences for people in high HIV prevalence countries. But the realization that HIV is not all about sex can only have positive consequences: people’s exposure can be reduced, perhaps totally eliminated. Accurate health information and health education, to which everyone has a right, can achieve this. Well informed, educated patients and healthcare practitioners can take action, raise awareness and change things for the better.

behavioral paradigm, HIV, institutional racism, media racism ,

The Deep Racism of Pathologizing Sex

2 Comments Posted by on August 27, 2017

What are the assumptions behind an article entitled “’Why are you having sex?’: women bear brunt of Uganda’s high HIV rate”? Firstly, the bulk of HIV transmission is assumed to be a result of ‘unsafe’ heterosexual behavior. Secondly, the number of infected females outnumbers males by almost 2:1, but this is blamed on ‘male sexual behavior’ (white people protecting black women from black men, etc?). Thirdly, all ‘Africans’ engage in massive amounts of sex. Fourthly, ‘unsafe’ sex is the rule. Fifthly, they start young…the list goes on.

This claptrap is mixed in with pseudo-science: there is no evidence that a majority of HIV transmissions in African countries are a result of ‘unsafe’ heterosexual sex, only a lot of ‘expert’ opinion; indeed, the evidence shows that the majority of transmissions are very unlikely to be a result of ‘unsafe’ sex.

Figures cited for percentages infected, males and females infected, etc, are not incorrect, that’s not why I call them pseudo-science. The sleight of hand lies in the fact that they purport to bear some relation to the levels of sexual activity that would be required for Uganda’s epidemic to be overwhelmingly a result of heterosexual activity.

More than 80,000 Ugandans were said to have been newly infected in 2015. Given estimates that suggest the risk of transmission from a male to a female for penile-vaginal sex is 1/1,250 and the risk for a female to a male is 1/2,500, those 80,000 newly infected people could represent well over 100,000,000 sex acts.

The Guardian further claims that girls between 15 and 24 years old are infected at a rate of 570 per week, reflecting a further assumption, that sexual debut tends to be at an exceptionally young age in Uganda (not true, according to most research). Most young girls have not had hundreds of sexual experiences, even girls in their 20s. Some may have, but most have not.

Most people do not have hundreds of sexual experiences every year. That’s true in every country in the world, even in countries where The Guardian would have us believe they do, countries where HIV prevalence is high. A minority of people may have a lot of sexual experiences, a small minority, according to the copious quantities of data collected by some of the best funded HIV NGOs (hundreds of surveys here).

There are two blatant non sequiturs behind articles like this: one, sexual activity is an indication of HIV prevalence, and two, HIV prevalence is an indication of levels (and perhaps types) of sexual activity. Neither of these are supported by the evidence, only by the assumptions, the prejudices, the deeply held racism of the media and the international HIV industry.

One of the most egregious consequences of these racist views is that a lot of money and effort have been expended on useless ‘abstinence only until marriage’ programs (which could be better referred to as ‘abstinence only until death’). An update to an earlier meta-analysis of such programs concluded that:

“U.S. abstinence-only-until-marriage policies and programs are not effective, violate adolescent rights, stigmatize or exclude many youth, and reinforce harmful gender stereotypes. Adolescent sexual and reproductive health promotion should be based on scientific evidence and understanding, public health principles, and human rights.”

The Guardian article is pure speculation, with a handful of figures thrown in. There is the ever-present ‘expert’ opinion about why more women than men are infected, etc, but the only constant throughout the article is racism, about ‘Africans’, their implied sexual behavior, their attitudes towards women, especially young women…the rightness of the HIV industry and the wrongness of all ‘African’ people.

If this sort of article is to be believed, all sex is wrong in Africa, it’s all ‘unsafe’, it should all stop. The men are cruel, the women are powerless victims and only non-Africans can diagnose what is going on there, phrenologize the population, profile the groups, strategize their rehabilitation and save them all from damnation (‘Shut up and get back in your pigeon-hole, we were right all along!’).

The assumption behind this Guardian article is that HIV is almost always heterosexually transmitted in African countries, and the only way this could be true is if ‘Africans’ really are as promiscuous, impervious to reason, cruel and thoughtless to those around them and, frankly, primitive and uncivilized, as the age-old prejudice says they are. As long as it’s about ‘Africans’, you can insinuate these things as often as you want in the mainstream media.

This kind of article can give the impression that apartheid never ended in South Africa. Instead, it spread all over the world, affecting people from African countries and people of African origin. Africans are still apart when it comes to HIV, infected in numbers that are orders of magnitude higher than among non-African people. ‘Explanations’ of high HIV prevalence tell us that ‘Africans’ really are different, that non-Africans don’t behave the same way when it comes to sex, that there really is something ‘other’ about heterosexual sex among black people. Pure racism.

behavioral paradigm, HIV, institutional racism, media racism, unsafe healthcare ,

HIV: Cuba’s Success and Uganda’s Failure

Comments Off on HIV: Cuba’s Success and Uganda’s Failure Posted by on March 14, 2017

Uganda is frequently mentioned in glowing terms in articles about HIV, especially in relation to the late 80s, 90s and early on in the 2000s. In contrast, Cuba is rarely mentioned in glowing terms, although the percentage of 15-49 year olds infected with HIV (prevalence), at 0.3%, is 23 times smaller than the same figure for Uganda, which stood at 7.1% in 2015 (all HIV figures from UNAIDS).

In fact, one could suggest that Uganda never got to grips with the epidemic. They still can’t explain why so many people, said to face a low risk of being infected with HIV, have seroconverted over the past several decades. Despite huge amounts of research, money and other resources being thrown at the country, the bulk of published research on HIV in Uganda seems to be focused on assumed sexual behavior and assumed sexually transmitted HIV.

Little or no international funding went into the HIV epidemic in Cuba. The country worked hard to research the epidemic, even before the first HIV positive person was identified there, several years before. Luckily, the country had a well developed health service, with more doctors per patient than any other high prevalence country (including the US). Indeed, the US (where an estimated 1.2 million were living with HIV in 2013) seemed intent on ridiculing Cuba’s approach to the virus.

Some of the criticisms were directed at claimed human rights aspects of Cuba’s achievements. It was often stated or implied that men who have sex with men were especially targeted by, for example, Cuba’s imposed ‘quarantine’. The quarantining started when little was known about the course of the illness, but it was relaxed once more was known. A number of personal accounts, some from men who have sex with men, now make it clear that many of the people quarantined are grateful to have received the care they got at the ‘sanitaria’ (there are links to other similar articles from this article).

An article by Tim Anderson finds that the quarantine did not target men who have sex with men; it also finds that other procedures were carried out in accordance with international guidelines. Anderson notes that Cuba was ‘more thorough’ in their testing and tracing procedures. Cuba has continued to make improvements in how they deal with the epidemic, which is a low level one, with men who have sex with men being the most affected group.

Sarah Z Hoffman refers to Cuba’s HIV program as ‘the most successful in the world’. Cuba approached HIV with the aim of reducing the likelihood of those infected going on to infect other people. That may sound like an obvious aim, but the greater thoroughness of Cuba identified by Anderson can be contrasted with a reduction in contact tracing in many countries, where it was claimed that certain groups were being unfairly targeted by such measures.

Cuba also started providing all HIV positive people with antiretrovirals in 2001, which they produced themselves as generic versions. Other countries had to wait a long time before they could provide more than a small fraction of HIV positive people with ARVs, and they had to pay astronomical amounts of money for them for years (although the costs are far lower now).

Hoffman writes “HIV infected people must provide the names of all sexual partners in the past six months, and those individuals must be tested for HIV. People found to have any sexually transmitted disease must undergo an HIV test as well. Voluntary HIV screening is encouraged.”

This is one of the places where practices in Cuba differ from practices in most other countries. This is called ‘contact tracing’ and it’s a vital tool of infection control. But in most countries people can claim anything they wish to about their sexual partners, that they have never had sex, that they have only engaged in heterosexual sex, that they have never injected drugs, etc. If people can withhold such information then contact tracing is impossible.

(My previous post is about a rare and valuable contribution to the history of HIV in Africa from John Potterat’s book ‘Seeking the Positives’, much of which concentrates on his work on HIV and STI epidemiology in the US. There’s a link to the chapter here. The approach the US adopted towards HIV could hardly have been more different from that of Cuba. Unfortunately, most other countries, certainly most poor countries, wedded themselves to the US, till death…etc.)

As a result of not tracing contacts, or of not doing so very assiduously, countries like the US, with extremely high transmission rates in certain groups, have never got their epidemic under control. In common with Cuba, the largest proportion of new HIV infections now is among men who have sex with men. Unlike Cuba, there is also a large injecting drug population in the US. But where contacts are not traced, they can not be offered the same opportunity to avoid infection if they are negative, or avoid infecting others if they are positive. Nor can they be ‘connected to care’ as quickly as possible.

In fact, many of the things western countries write copiously about, such as early testing and treatment, universal testing, elimination of mother to child transmission, universal access to treatment, were achieved in Cuba years ago, but have never been fully achieved even in some western countries. Where HIV prevalence is highest, in southern and eastern African countries, some of those achievements may not be realized in our lifetime.

Unfortunately for the worst affected countries, the rights of individuals are claimed to be foremost. Their contacts, past and future, are not treated as individuals. If the individual has multiple partners and chooses not to reveal that they engage in high risk practices, that’s considered to be the individual’s business. If the individual has had no sexual partners, or no HIV positive sexual partners, then the source of their infection needs to be identified. But in high prevalence African countries tracing of non-sexual contacts is rare. What you do find a lot of in research is findings referred to as ‘biased’, because the researcher expected every HIV transmission to be a case of sexual transmission.

(Despite the apparent desire of most countries to protect people’s individual rights in relation to HIV, this approach seemed to go out the window when the virus involved was ebola. Some ‘infection control’ measures seemed to involve groups breaking into people’s houses, forcing them into shabby health facilities, burning their property in public, spraying their houses, breaking up families and communities, etc. Who knows what approach will be taken to the next headline grabbing epidemic.)

So why all the attention and resources for a country that appears to have lost control of HIV a long time ago, and why all the rhetorical questions about Uganda, how their ‘success’ can be replicated, etc? More importantly, why so little attention for Cuba, and why is it so belated? We can learn a lot from both countries. Instead, we should be asking what Cuba did right, and continues to do right, but what Uganda did wrong, and continues to do wrong.

Cuba’s approach to HIV may have been the most successful anywhere. Some would go further and claim that Cuba may be the only country that was seriously threatened by the virus, but gained complete control over the epidemic early on, and retained that control. In the sphere of human rights, also, Cuba has made a lot of progress. Uganda, on the other hand, continues to move in the opposite direction in the fields of public health, human rights, HIV, political stability, economy, etc.

behavioral paradigm, blood, HIV, unsafe healthcare ,

Unsafe Sex and Unsafe Healthcare are Mutually Exclusive HIV Risks in African Countries?

1 Comment Posted by on November 10, 2014

Recently, I blogged about a series of investigations that took place in various US states over a period of 10 years because of 86 cases of hepatitis C infection (HCV) being discovered, which could not be explained by the usual risks for this virus in a wealthy country, namely intravenous drug use and the like.

This extremely comprehensive investigation revealed that the 86 infections resulted from the actions of just six health personnel, who all had an addiction to controlled drugs. Over the course of 10 years they had put the safety of an estimated 30,000 patients at risk.

When a young woman in Brazil was found to be infected with HIV and no obvious sexual risks were established, rigorous research was carried out to discover a possible mode of transmission. The research found that the woman may have been exposed to contaminated manicure instruments many years before.

The manicure instruments belonged to the patient’s cousin, who had been on antiretroviral drugs, but whose treatment had lapsed. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the patient had very likely been infected by this cousin, and that sharing contaminated manicure instruments was the most likely mode of infection.

Worryingly, the paper finds that “In a recent case of transmission among women, the CDC lists, along[side] classical transmission routes, potential alternative sources that must be ruled out, such as tattooing, acupuncture, piercing, the use of shared sex toys between the partners and other persons, and exposure to body fluids, but does not include manicure instruments.”

The use of shared sex toys but not other shared instruments? Forgive me for thinking that people working for the CDC and other normative agencies may have some unresolved issues relating to assumed sexual practices, and perhaps an aversion to discussing non-sexual risks; or maybe that’s just when it relates to African countries?

Although an estimated 70% of HIV positive people live in sub-Saharan Africa, the kinds of investigation that were carried out in the US and Brazil do not appear to have been carried out in any African country. At least, if they have been carried out, they have not been written up in peer-reviewed papers.

Anyone who has visited Kampala in Uganda or Moshi in Tanzania may have seen people with basins of manicure equipment being used in the open, in shops and other premises, on women waiting for buses, working, shopping or just taking some time for a manicure or pedicure.

In Dar es Salaam and other places you may see men shaving another man’s head with a hand held, double edged razor. When one has finished, they swap around. Little nicks and cuts are usually treated with a piece of tissue, or possibly with a bit of antiseptic.

However, when people are diagnosed with HIV in African countries they are generally not asked about their possible non-sexual exposures, through unsafe cosmetic, traditional or healthcare practices. When people say they have not had sex, that they have not had sex with a HIV positive person, or that they have only had protected sex, these matters are generally dismissed.

HIV is not the only pathogen that is possibly fairly frequently transmitted in cosmetic, traditional and healthcare contexts, where skin-piercing is involved. Other pathogens include hepatitis, various bacterial infections, scabies, even ebola. Where skin-piercing is not involved, also, several serious diseases can be transmitted in these environments, for example TB.

It seems that, because it’s Africa, sex is always imputed, even when the patient makes it clear that this may not be, perhaps even cannot be, the mode of transmission. Because it’s Africa, unsafe healthcare, it seems that cosmetic and traditional practices can not explain otherwise inexplicable HIV infections.

According to normative agencies such as UNAIDS, healthcare and other environments are unsafe enough to explain high prevalence of hepatitis C in several low HIV prevalence countries, such as Egypt, but can’t explain high HIV prevalence in a low HCV prevalence country, such as South Africa.

Why should healthcare be unsafe and sexual behavior safe in all and only the countries with high HCV prevalence in Africa, while healthcare is safe and sexual behavior unsafe in all and only the countries with high HIV epidemics? Also, if sexual behavior is so unsafe in sub-Saharan Africa, shouldn’t HCV prevalence also be high all high HIV prevalence countries?

AIDS, ebola, 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 , , ,

Uganda Taking UNAIDS’s Propaganda to its Illogical Conclusion

Comments Off on Uganda Taking UNAIDS’s Propaganda to its Illogical Conclusion Posted by on June 7, 2014

Since HIV first became a media football, various commentators have obsessed about the idea that there are lots of people who deliberately transmit HIV. There were loads of stories about it in the early days, and they still appear every now and again. One of the countries to take this idea most seriously is Uganda, who have created a law that purports to be aimed at people who ‘deliberately’ transmit HIV.

The fact that there are probably very few such people, if any, won’t worry those supporting the passing of the bill. Some of them have got a lot of mileage out of victim blaming, while making no effort whatsoever to reduce HIV transmission, or to reduce any other kind of human suffering.

This bill may have the unintended effect of criminalizing the work of people who work with skin piercing instruments, such as health care workers, traditional practitioners and cosmetic workers, who all may break skin and draw blood every working day, whether deliberately or by accident, and who may inadvertently infect a client with hepatitis, HIV or some other blood born pathogen.

Uganda has failed to establish how HIV is still being transmitted at a rate high enough to keep prevalence at about the same level for over 10 years. Now they are blaming anyone they can think of rather than reconsidering the epidemic in their country. Perhaps receiving global attention for speaking openly about the virus in the early days counted as doing something then, but now, after nearly three decades of continuing high rates of transmission, being open is not enough.

It’s time to investigate infections, trace partners and, more importantly, to investigate non-sexual risks, such as those people face when visiting health facilities, traditional and cosmetic practitioners. Being open about HIV means being open about how the virus is spread, rather than continuing to rant on about individual sexual behavior. That cash cow is drying up, anyhow, so now is a good time for this weaning process to begin.

[For more about non-sexual HIV risks, visit our Healthcare Risks and Cosmetic Risks for HIV]

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