Acquired Immunity from Details Syndrome

In Brief

South Africa's President Mbeki is sticking his head in the sand about AIDS, which is presently destroying his country. By not admitting HIV actually causes trouble, he's free to blame his nation's troubles on all manner of vague maladies. Unfortunately, this sort of rationalization has been tried before, when Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian decreed syphilis was a punishment from God. Guess what? It didn't help anything. Without actually working on the problem, everyone gets sick and dies anyway.

Party On

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The News

7/24/2000 The World AIDS Conference opened in South Africa on July 10, 2000 amidst the need to do something about the fact that 4.2 million souls in Africa were infected with HIV. Unfortunately, South African President Mbeki took the opportunity to ramble about extreme poverty causing AIDS.

The recent world AIDS conference in South Africa highlighted a serious public health problem the continent experiences: the dismal fact that significant, and we mean about 22 percent, of Africa's population is presently infected with HIV. That South Africa's President Mbeki puts forth the dubious opinion that AIDS and HIV are unrelated doesn't help matters any. He buys into the theory, most loudly advocated by UC Berkeley professor Dr. Peter Duesberg (and refuted by almost everyone else), that AIDS is caused by a variety of risk factors that have nothing to do with HIV. There is a grand tradition of misplaced rationalization in the face of seemingly insurmountable disaster, and Mbeki seems to be following it. Of course, the misplaced rationalization usually makes things worse, and that's the other half of the tradition.

By listening to the "dissident AIDS movement", Mbeki can feel at ease should he decide not to try to change his country's sexual mores and instead blame everything on them not receiving enough foreign dollars. The dissident AIDS folks argue that AIDS comes from poverty, drug use, malnutrition, and a variety of other social ills that, frankly, South Africa has in abundance. We can't blame Mbeki for wanting to look at the problem that way, because changing people's attitudes about sex probably seems harder than bitching for economic aid. However, we can blame him for blatantly ignoring reality. Same goes for the dissident AIDSters, who perceive this HIV-AIDS link as a dupe concocted by scientists to get more grant money.

Medieval syphilis patients

Trying to find political or divine meaning in natural disasters is fruitless business, and, if the disaster is ongoing, damn near dangerous. Following a militaristic jaunt to sunny Naples in 1494, Charles VIII's French army found itself dying of then-unknown morbus Gallicus, or the French disease. Nowadays we call this syphilis.[1] The disease swept up and down Europe (what, you think people didn't put out back then?) and was roundly denounced as a tool of divine vengeance. In cahoots with the papacy, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian decreed that syphilis was a punishment for blasphemers. As such, one of the more popular treatments, extracts from the guaiac tree, was called "holy wood". Other treatments didn't appeal so much to God as to Galenic medicine, which basically said that syphilis meant you had too much phlegm in your body. Hence, mercury poisoning was the perfect solution, because it made you drool uncontrollably. Of course, there's always the problem of the mercury poisoning itself, but medieval medicine wasn't an exact science.

Maximilian himself must have felt grand for issuing that decree. Indeed, it echoes likely Reform Candidate Presidential nominee Pat Buchanan's famous statement that "promiscuous sodomy - unnatural, unsanitary sexual relations between males, which every great religion teaches is immoral - is the cause of AIDS." Both Maximilian's decree and Buchanan's statement labeled those with a foul, and occasionally fatal, disease as targets for denunciation. Syphilitics were not simply stricken; Maximilian thought they were evil and richly deserving of their fate. At least, that is what he thought until he caught it. Afterwards, he decided that maybe he was giving syphilitics a bad rap and sent an enormous entourage to Spain and Portugal to see how people were being treated, and maybe to find a cure for him too.

The same sort of thing is happening right now to AIDS dissidents: the ones that have HIV are, well, dying of AIDS. Some of them, convinced that AIDS comes from poverty and not HIV, fought off treatments even while wasting away in hospital beds, absolutely sure their HIV-positive status had nothing to do with their sickness. They bought into the idea that the HIV-AIDS link really represented Western scientific greed and hubris, rather than a simple fact. Right now Mbeki stares in the face the reality that one-fifth of his country will be dead of AIDS-related causes in the next ten years, and seems stubbornly convinced he needs to search for meaning in the disaster. This is too bad. From where we're standing, every time you go looking for metaphorical meaning in uncontrollable disasters, and especially when you get on some sort of moral high horse, Mother Nature bites you in the ass.

Footnotes

1. To be fair, no one at the time knew exactly where syphilis came from. It had also been called the German disease, The Naples disease, the Italian disease, and the Spanish disease.

 
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