..."regimines" should be read regimens, of course...

Well:

This is a polite way of saying these people are too stoned to care.

This is alarming and terrible, but this notion of paying these people to take their drugs is foolish. It doesn't solve either of the following problems:

(1) These merely prolong life, and this will NOT stop the spread of HIV/AIDS.

(2) These won't even prolong life, because these people have so many other toxins in their body. They life terribly unhealthy lives, and AIDS medication is irrelevant if they can't even kick their heroin addictions.

I find it absolutely foolish that we have the Vancouver Network of Drug Users. As if they are some sort of civil rights group?

For starters, let's focus on prevention. The needle exchange is a good start and I would like to see some statistics on the effectiveness of this safe injection site.

Secondly, lets battle the drug problem. Let's get the dealers and users in jail.

As for the SROs - what else do they need? It is free (or heavily subsidized) and a warm place to sleep. We don't have the resources to give everybody plush pads. There is only so much money to go around, and tens of millions is already provided.

There are people paying nearly 200K for bachelor pads, which are nothing more than 400 sq. feet. SROs aren't good enough???

Tom Sandborn, will you please tell Tyee's readers the names of the anti-retrovirals currently used by doctors in BC to treat hiv infection; what company (companies) produce them, and what is the source of funding for the BC Centre For Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

Without this information it is not possible for a knowledgeable reader to decide if it is actually a good idea for hiv-positive people to be using such chemotherapy, especially bcause of the huge amount of information that they are extremely dangerous.

In this regard I would suggest that readers do their own due diligence on protease inhibitors, AZT and nucleoside and non-nucleoside inhibitors of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase.

Of course, it is important to know the funding for The BC Centre for Excelllence in Aids, because, for instance if it is funded by a large pharmaceutical company, there is, to say the least, a significant question of there being a vested interest in selling drugs, not to mention a responsibility of Mr. Sandborn to ascertain and present such a vested interest in his article.

Capitalism, maybelle:
Do you do video diagnosis too, just like Bill Frist Ã* la Terry Schiavo?

Perhaps a good place to start in learning about the dangers of anti-retrovirals is an article by David Crowe (June, 2001) entitled "Concerns about HAART" (highly active anti-retroviral therapy).

The January, 2006 "Smart" trials which were stopped by the NIAID because the chemotherapies were causing unacceptable injuries are also very instructive about the dangers of the most recent generations of anti-retrovirals.

A news release regarding cessation of these huge clinical trials can be found under the title, "International HIV/AIDs Trial Finds Continuous Antiretroviral Therapy Superior to Episodic Therapy." There were 318 clinical sites in 33 countries and 5,472 volunteers involved in the study.

Unfortunately, these are social welfare truisms which have next to no chance of making an impact in the near to medium-term future, which is the planning horizon this proposal is attempting to deal with. Discussion of those factors belong in a multi-generational treatment of the issue, not the kind of just-in-time stop-gap measure being proposed here.

And job counselling--? I know fully-functional PhDs who could use a dose of that. What jobs are we going to counsel the DTES residents for, exactly...?

That place is a self-perpetuating charnel house...and a nasty money maker for both the low and the high. It'll continue perpetuating itself until it is dispersed (one way or another). Many of the people I see down there clearly need to be institutionalized, where they would be sheltered, bathed, clothed, fed, medicated and supervised on a daily basis. They're already "institutionalized" in their current life-style and status. This current proposal just adds another layer of exploitation into the mix, in my opinion.

Dr. Perry Kendall, BC's medical healh officer is quoted as saying that across BC only one in three hiv-positive people is being treated with anti-retrovirals.

Perhaps, Mr. Kendall, this is an excellent opportunity for the provincial government to fund a clinical trial of hiv-positives who are taking anti-retrovirals and hiv-positives who are not taking them. This would be a decisive method of determining the safety and efficacy of such drugs, and if, in fact, "watachful waiting" and improved nutrition and abstinence from injection drugs is, as I believe, a much more productive and safe method of treating hiv positivity.

It is now well known that hiv positivity is not, in itself, a death sentence, as the Aidists have universally claimed.

It is particularly distressing that the protocols for hiv treatment includes the prescribing of dangerous anti-retrovirals even when the subject remains 100% free of hiv- illness symptomology.

There are many respected scientists who believe that these anti-retrovirals are themselves the single greatest concurrence for the progression from mere hiv positivity to serious immune suppression.

The treating of asymptomatic "illness" is not only a problem regarding hiv treatment. It remains a windfall for the pharmaceutical companies and is practised with other "illnesses" such as hypertension and "early onset" glaucoma.

Wow, and "common wisdom" had it that only "far away in Africa', etc., could such an unacceptable situation exist! But here it is on our doorstep.

Bobb999 the figures for HIV and Aids propagandized by the Aidists are finally being challenged. Here's an excellent article published a few weeks ago in the Washington Post:

"How Aids in Africa Was Overstated," by Craig Timberg. April 6, 2006

Great article Truman. Here's the actual weblink if anyone else wants to take a look:

"How Aids in Africa Was Overstated," by Craig Timberg. April 6, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/05/AR2006040502517.html

It demonstrates the fallacy of "fool proof" statistical reasoning, and how statistics can be made to serve virtually any given agenda. Most of us are defenceless against statistics because only 'initiated' specialists can combat them effectively. You have to be on the inside. The whole area of Statistics has been allowed to assume the status of gospel truth in modern political discourse, replacing ideas and values altogether - its a false god that needs to be demolished & placed in proper perspective.

If untreated HIV infections are a serious problem in Vancouver's own D.T.E.S, you can bet your bippy, it's an even more serious and widespread problem in developing countries in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. Even in G8 Russia, HIV infection is a growing problem, including insufficient response by the medical system.

In quibbling over the exact stats re. HIV in Africa and elsewhere, what exactly is the point quibblers are trying to make? If large numbers of people are suffering and dying of preventable or treatable disease, this is an unacceptable situation demanding the commitment of rich, fat cat nations, including Canada.

An analogy: If Willie Picton ends up getting convicted of "only" 12, instead of 27 murders, does that make him less of a danger to society, or that he deserves a lighter sentence?

If Hitler's Nazi regime had systematically murdered "only" 3 million, instead of 6 million Jews, should that be viewed as evidence the Third Reich was actually much gentler than we'd previously thought, and that perhaps convicted perpetrators, such as the hanged Eichmann, deserved a penalty no more harsh than life in prison?

Unnecessary AIDS deaths are a serious problem
in the world, including many parts of Africa. This is an unacceptable situation, no matter how you slice the numbers.

On a side note, Businessweek says GlaxoSmithKline still controls about 50 percent of the market for HIV drugs.

Bobb999, I wish it were as straight-forward as you describe...But it isn't.

TaxCutter99 - wanna know something else that's even more unfunny: GlaxoSmithKline used to be a major sponsor of the early big-city circuit party "fundraisers" I've been criticising on these threads. No joke.

Africa:
This report brought home to me that its like a domino effect that hits so much more than the actual AIDS death rates in Africa. Food growth and distribution. And again, women and children are the hardest hit.

http://www.fao.org/FOCUS/E/aids/aids6-e.htm

Pale - An effective website but the solution still won't be found in a massive first-world pay-off of Big Pharmacy just so they can flood the continent with their anti-viral medication.

That's the bottom line behind a lot of the lobbying effort right now.

I agree that all the co-factors related to the collapse of civil society and the failure of regional economies need to be addressed...But really: what else is new? The continent will continue to be a basket case until it is "brought along" with a massive first-world-driven Marshall Plan - let's call is Post-modern humanitarian colonization.

I had a beautifully composed answer....But the Moof monster ate it...ah well....Reader condensed version: I dont have all the answers, but wanted to point out that the ravages of this disease are more far reaching than the actual numbers of people with AIDS.
That and that its the women and kids who are now suffering from that.
Anti virals are a band aid. Not the solution. TOTAL agreement.
Eradication through education and awareness are still the best answer to this plague.
(and then I mentioned the "faith" based abstinence programs being not such a huge help either)

Aids cases in Africa were mostly done without an Hiv test, (who can afford them?) but rather by what is known as clinical case diagnosis. That is, there are many illnesses that were called "Aids", even without a test. At one point in Tanzania patients could be diagnosed with "Aids" if they presented with one of three symptoms such as persistent diarhrea, loss of weight and a persistent cough.

In America, Canada and Europe a person will be diagnosed with "Aids" if he has any one of 29 so-called "Aids-defining illness" PLUS a positive Hiv antibody test. If he has the same illness, without a positive Hiv test, he doesn't have aids.

Honest! And of course the illnesses have all been around for centuries.

These tests are very expensive for Africans. The state of the art pharmacorp science is trying to develope a cheap flow cytometry system whereby they shoot a single file stream of serum or plasma past a laser or other kind of light and count the proteins as they go go--most significantly immunoglobulins, that is, antibodies. It is the so-called antibody tests, which are the main device for concluding hiv positivity or negativity.

Problem is the human immune system developes non-specific and specific immunuglobulins. Specific immunoglobulins are those that are claimed to react with one or more of the antigens(proteins) on the envelope of the hiv virus such as (g)p24. (There's a controversy also whether such antigens, which are dilineated only by molecular weight, are themselves specific to HIV)

Non-specific immunoglobulins may react with innumerable pathogens--or proteins that the immune systems "believes" are pathogens.
Hence, non-specificity. (auto-immune illnesses and allergies occur when the immune system basically goes wild and turns on its owner, hence arthritis.)

This is the point at which the non-believers of the hiv/aids hypothesis differ from the Aidists.

So-called "denialists" and "dissidents" don't believe that the antibody tests mean anything because the reaction that is shown is merely the result of the immune system signaling that something is wrong.

It's a huge leap in faith for the Aidists to conclude that the antibodies are reacting to a retrovirus, and a convenient leap which has resulted in the hundreds of billions of dollars being sucked out of governments.

The entire controversy can be best studied by reading "Whose Antibodies Are They, Anyway," by Christine Johnson.

The Hiv antibody tests should be used only as a screening test to determine if the patient has been in contact with some kind of pathogen or toxic syndrome. Despite what the Aidists claim, there is no proof that the reaction is caused by a retrovirus.

I've only just scratched the service of the controversy. The second and third lines of diagnosis, the cluster of differentiation number 4 counts (CD4+lymphocytes) and the polymerase chain reaction tests to supposedly determine "viral loads" have been continually called into question by the "dissidents."

In fact, nobel prize winner, Kary Mullis, who invented the PCR tests, has repeatedly said that for the Aidists scientists to use his method of mathematically amplifying a retrovirus (actually only a tiny part of the hiv genome) that nobody can find as a complete infectious unit, such as the hepatitis B virus, is a misuse of the polymerase chain reaction.

And so, Bobb999, this is a tiny part of the reason why I don't believe that referring to overstated "Aids" cases in Africa is quibbling.

My friend says nobody knows what I'm talking about, so what I'm trying to say is that hiv doesn't cause immune suppression. It's a joke, a hoax, not even sensible.

Pale, we're touching on some huge issues, and I appreciate that threads like these are limited in terms of allowing a full exploration of the issues involved.

Regarding the abstinence (not the best word) issue....some form of sexual continence or sexual self-discipline has to be maintained in the messaging (although I agree that confining the message to just that is absurd). I'm only saying this because AIDS-HIV experts here in the developed world are now cursing the messaging that went out to the gay male community surrounding "condom discipline" throughout the mid & late eighties and all of the Nineties. The condom messaging was fine, but inherent in the way the message was delivered was the secondar message that serial penetrative stranger-sex was normative among the target population (which it definitely wasn't by any means at that time). The fact that it was mostly "faith-based" interests that were blowing the whistle on the mis-messaging back then is irrelevant - the salient point is that they were the only ones doing so, and they have now been proven correct. The health experts now agree that messaging regarding "condom discipline" - if not executed correctly - simply kicks the bottom right out of the bucket.

Condom messaging without sexual ethic messaging that inculcates principles like self-restraint, sexual continence for men, and bodily self-reservation and self-respect is totally irresponsible and extremely damaging over the long term. Again, just look at urban North American gay communities to see your proof.

On another note, I find it interesting how the "women and children" mantra is being used to underwrite the argument. Does that somehow change the salient issues here...?

Nightbloom
I don't want to get involved in this. It's not my issue, but you can hardly claim that that sort of view about gay sexual behavior was invented by anti-HIV campaigns.

I'm not sure how normative bathhouse behavior was because I know nothing about the community. I have read enough to know that finding a way to address the issues of disease spread among those members of the gay community for whom that kind of behavior was normative must have been in the forefront of the campaign to try and stop the wildfire spread of AIDS in the 1980s. Especially among a total gay population at the time that was largely still, I guess the word is closeted, and for whom bathhouse culture may have been their only gay sexual release.

I just don't think you can accuse AIDS researchers and public health professionals of being more than peripherally responsible for the kind of behavior you describe.

I think Uganda's Education program, the ABC thing, has been pretty successful in combining the elements some of you have been discussing above, has it not?

Anyway, my only contribution - I leave it to you.

Wrong, Gwest. This is exactly what the health researchers are now saying - both here & in Europe.

Talk to them, as I have done. Read their articles, as I have done. Follow the issue over two decades, as I have done.

Then come back & tell nightbloom where it's at.

They didn't create the behaviour (which isn't what I said, as any fair reading of my posting would reveal).

They reinforced and propogated it on a an an exponentially wider scale than it previously existed, with the steady barrage of government-funded "safe sex" messaging that saturated the public sphere and which sought to validate those behaviours in a non-judgmental way, and which systematically separated the act itself from the context. They thought they were doing the right thing.

The bottom line is that safer sex messaging is useless when it also strips the act of any contextual ethic or valuation. Sure, teach condom use as a means to combatting the disease. But also teach self-restraint and sexual continence. The act is far, far more than the sum of its parts.

As long as you agree they didn't create the behavior.
Other than that, I agree with you.

nightbloom:
You may have seen this, if not, it's probably worthy of a minute or two and it is almost in context in this thread, I think:
http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/05/christianists_f.html

To have a look at the controversy currently raging between so-called "denialists" as myself (we've been likened to holocaust deniers) and the Aidists, read Celia Farber's article in the March edition of Harper's magazine entitled, "Out of Control, The Corruption of Medical Science."

http://www.harpers.org/outofcontrol.html

And for the rebuttal by Robert Gallo, supposed discoverer of the Hiv virus, (it is alleged that Gallo discovered the virus by accepting a courtesy gift of a sample of the virus from Pasteur Clinic's Luc Montaigner, and claimed that he had made the original discovery)google "Robert Gallo's Rebuttal of Celia Farber.

Alcibiades, Yes I did see it. I agree with him to the extent that the Christian narrative and the basic value-system wrapped up inside it needs to be re-claimed from American fundamentalism. He's been saying this for a long time - I remember when the mouthpieces with the homoactivist echo-chamber denounced him as a "self-loathing" homosexual for defending moderate religion back in the early nineties. Go figure. I recall the rhetoric took a particularly nasty anti-Catholic vein...my first exposure the that phenomenon.

For amusement's sake, it appears Andrew now has a self-annointed alter-ego within the blogosphere:

http://johnheard.blogspot.com/

That should have read: ..."the mouthpieces within the homoactivist echo-chamber..."

Project Empty Bowl full of love
Symbolic sale of empty bowls expected to fund 8,000 meals for

people living with AIDS in the Lower Mainland

How is it possible that by creating an empty bowl, one can actually help reduce the number of empty bowls that exist?

Being held June 1, Project Empty Bowl is a biannual charity event and auction of handmade bowls by B.C.s premier artisans that supports A Loving Spoonful. Guests will receive a dinner bowl hand-made by an artisan – in wood, clay, or glass – which they can use to sample an array of international delicacies created by local dining establishments. June Katz will add her jazz stylings to the evening, the highlight of which is a silent and live auction of bowls created by the artisans – one worth an estimated $8,000.

“Vancouver’s artistic and culinary communities really get behind us for this one,” says A Loving Spoonful Executive Director Sue Moen. “It’s symbolic – eating some of our city’s most marvelous food out of a simple bowl, representing hunger.”

Moen adds the event will likely raise enough to pay for an entire month’s operations – enough for almost 8,000 meals.

“Our clientele’s nutritional requirements are higher than an average person’s, and the disease creates a lot of barriers to eating like nausea, depression, and fatigue,” Moen says. “Poverty is a huge issue as well. They are scrambling just to find adequate shelter. Many of them live in substandard housing with poor cooking facilities.”

One of the restaurants featured at the event is the Cook Studio Café, a Downtown Eastside restaurant that is also a cook training facility for the Youth Internship Program. In addition to running a full-service restaurant and bakery, the Studio puts on wellness, nutrition and cooking workshops for community groups and local residents.

The artists and restaurants are donating their work, so all money raised will go to feeding some of the city’s most vulnerable souls. One of the bowls donated by Vancouver’s own Paul Mathieu is worth $8,000. Jack Olive, Joanne Copp, Louise Duthie, Brian Baxter, the glass artists of Starfish Glassworks, Tam Irving and Jeannette Lee are just a few of the returning and new artists participating.

Project Empty Bowl is being held at UBC Robson Square downtown on June 1 from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.. Tickets are available for $45, and web site preview of live auction items start May 12th. Contact A Loving Spoonful (604-682-6325) or log on to alovingspoonful.org to buy tickets.

A Loving Spoonful serves more than 100,000 free, nutritious meals a year to adults and children living with AIDS in the Greater Vancouver area. The volunteer-driven charity operates under the mission statement that no one living with AIDS should live with hunger.

Media Enquiries:

Sue Moen, Executive Director

A Loving Spoonful

Phone: 604-682-6325

Email:

Soon after Celia Farber published her article, "Out of Control-AIDS and the corruption of medical science," Robert Gallo (who claimed to have discovered the "hi" virus) and a group of mostly non-scientists did a rebuttal which appeared on the web.

Now a group of hiv/aids hypothesis non-believers (denialists and dissidents as they've been called by the Aidist community, have done a rebuttal of the rebuttal. Here's the link:

http://rethinkaids.info/GalloRebuttal/overview.html

Taxcutter99, I'm extremely interesting in knowing the number of children who have been diagnosed with AIDS in the Lower Mainland.