Challenging Euro-America's Politics of Identity: The Return of the Native by Jorge Luis Andrade Fernandes

Author:Jorge Luis Andrade Fernandes [Fernandes, Jorge Luis Andrade]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781135977009
Google: CwqUAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17531000
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

How we learned to stop worrying and love the virus

The United Nations estimates that 4.2 million South Africans, approximately 20 percent of the nation’s population, are HIV positive.129 Compelled by the epidemic’s magnitude, South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, set out to find answers. In interviews and in a letter to Kofi Annan and President Bill Clinton, Mbeki admits spending countless sleepless nights poring over scientific and medical documents and surfing the web in an attempt to understand HIV/AIDS’ disproportionate impact on Africa.130 He is unconvinced by the answers he finds. The scientific community attributes the geometric disparity in rates of infection between Africa, India, and the West to infective differences in the variants of HIV-1. They contend that while the subtype B of HIV-1 accounts for the majority of HIV infections in Europe and the United States, the subtype C of HIV-1 – a far more virulent strain of HIV transmitted primarily through heterosexual sex – affects Africa and India.131 Although this theory accounts for some of the differences in rates of infection, Mbeki argues that it does not satisfactorily explain the magnitude of the differences. In the letter, he asserts that he is

convinced that our urgent task is to respond to the specific threat that faces us as Africans. We will not eschew this obligation in favour of the comfort of the recitation of a catechism that may very well be a correct response to the specific manifestations of AIDS in the West.132

Spurred by the belief that current scientific explanations are impoverished by their failure to develop context-specific models for the epidemic, President Mbeki assembled a blue-ribbon advisory panel of thirty international experts to meet in South Africa to “re-evaluate” the cause of AIDS.133 There was an instant outcry from the scientific community over the panel’s composition. The HIV/AIDS community was incensed by Mbeki’s inclusion among the panel’s thirty members of two scientists they considered “heretics.” The two American scientists, David Rasnick, a biochemist, and Peter Duesberg, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Berkeley, maintain that there is no conclusive evidence that HIV is the etiologic agent of AIDS, a conclusion Mbeki rejects. Rather, Rasnick and Duesberg contend, the causes of AIDS are poverty and malnutrition. The scientific community engaged in an unprecedented public relations campaign aimed at forcing Mbeki to excuse the heretics from the panel and to affirm that HIV is the sole etiologic agent of AIDS. In an open letter published in Nature, a group of international scientists, somewhat contradictorily, insisted that though they valued open debate they failed to see the value in “giving excessive credence to populist hypotheses that fly in the face of established evidence and fail to survive rigorous peer review.”134

The chorus of disapproval over the panel’s inclusion of Rasnick and Duesberg was rivaled only by outcries over Mbeki’s stance on AZT. While surfing the web, President Mbeki came across a paper in the journal Current Medical Research and Opinion, co-authored by Gordon Stewart and Eleni Papadopolous-Eleopulos, arguing that AZT,

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