Beware, AIDS can’t be a myth!

Apr 17, 2007

Letter of the day<br><br>SIR — On Friday evening at around 10:00pm, Professor Charles Geshekter from America was interviewed live from America radio Billal FM 94.1. I was shocked by his utterances. He said he invented the machine that tests HIV but according to him, the machine was for another p

Letter of the day

SIR — On Friday evening at around 10:00pm, Professor Charles Geshekter from America was interviewed live from America radio Billal FM 94.1. I was shocked by his utterances. He said he invented the machine that tests HIV but according to him, the machine was for another purpose! He said categorically that there is no virus called HIV that causes AIDS, and therefore AIDS is a total myth that grew in people’s minds.

He said that for one to get the ‘so-called HIV’ you must have had sexual intercourse for more than 5000 times with the same partner. He challenged if there was any one who could identify 10 diseases that were killing Ugandans before the advent of AIDS.

According to this professor, the ‘AIDS’ that kills mostly Africans is a result of wrong tests that produce positive results and thus plant in people trauma, fatigue, stress and so on. These tests are carried out in laboratories using wrong test kits. To him, the AIDS that kills Africans is the many conditions

apart from HIV infection such as TB, malaria, malnutrition, bad water, poverty and multiple infections which can cause a person to test positive. He believes that testing alone is killing many Africans. the stigma is doing the damage. He also said the Nevirapin that infected people use has never been launched in any country therefore he disagrees with its distribution. He called upon African countries for a re-appraisal of the idea that a positive test is liable to develop the disease. Different HIV test procedures produce such widely different results that their use should be re-examined. Yet at present some people have been frightened to death by a positive diagnosis. He gave an example of the young girl who tested positive several times but afterwards tested negative (The New vision, April 3). He stressed that there was such a big problem with false positives that when doctors repeat the tests, there are many disparities in the results. A test kit from one manufacturer behaves differently from another. I think this professor wants us to be fooled into believing things that serve Western interests. If he claims to be on the panel of the World Health Organisation (WHO) then why doesn’t WHO openly come up and declare that there is no AIDS instead of creating controversies among people? Uganda has been one of the African countries to respond to the pandemic with remarkable results but if such people begin coming into the country and trying to change the thinking we will continue dying. What can be the logic behind the person who pretends to be the inventor of the machine that tests HIV? And if he knew that it was not testing HIV, why did he have to present it to the WHO officials for approval? Why did he have to keep a deaf ear if he knew that it was not the appropriate machine to test the virus?

WHO should tell the world what the secret behind this man and his team is. The Government of Uganda should discuss this serious matter because Geshekter seems to be a powerful man with big support who claims to have visited Uganda and Africa more than 20 times.

WHO, UNAIDS and all other global health partners should analyse this otherwise our lives are in danger. However, as an AIDS activist and a patriot we must strengthen our fight against HIV and AIDS. AIDS is real and it the reason why we die. it is not necessarily poverty and diseases that kill Africans. Uganda in particular still needs to build on whatever successes it has achieved so far.

Johnson M. Kyeswa
Uganda Students AIDS Prevention Association

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