I posted a month or so back about the controversy surround President Mbeki's
views on AIDS and his letter to President Clinton and other international
leaders. Since then, political reaction has been low key, with the
Americans stressing the Mbeki's positive contribution (AIDS is an African
problem which needs African solutions) and downplaying the negative (does
HIV cause AIDS?).
Now, however, the temperature is rising in advance of the AIDS 2000
conference, which will be held in Durban. Nature reports "massive
consternation among all scientists, doctors and many others in the
international community who treat AIDS patients or who work on AIDS in other
ways. There is widespread anxiety that denying or doubting the cause of AIDS
will cost countless lives if blood screening, use of condoms, and methods to
prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus are not implemented or,
worse, even abandoned."
It has printed a declaration "signed by over 5,000 people, including Nobel
prizewinners, directors of leading research institutions, scientific
academies and medical societies, notably the US National Academy of
Sciences, the US Institute of Medicine, Max Planck institutes, the European
Molecular Biology Organization, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Royal
Society of London, the AIDS Society of India and the National Institute of
Virology in South Africa. In addition, thousands of individual scientists
and doctors have signed, including many from the countries bearing the
greatest burden of the epidemic. Signatories are of MD, PhD level or
equivalent, although scientists working for commercial companies were asked
not to sign."
The "Durban Declaration" is currently available at
http://www.nature.com/nature/prepub/index.html
AIDS 2000 is certain to provide a forum for a series of sometimes bitter
conflicts about the role of science: with public sector scientists; private
sector scientists; international business; pressure groups; rich and poor
world politicians; and various "publics" entering the ring.
Harvard economist, David Bloom set the scene, when debating the issue with
the US Secretary of State for Health, Donna Shalala, and others: "I think
that the central element of any long run vision of how were going to deal
with and cope with this epidemic, as Secretary Shalala mentioned, is
basically science and scientific advance. [However] I think we have a
situation where we're beginning to run some risk that science will come to
be viewed as fundamentally irrelevant for us and society for dealing with
this particular epidemic. In other words, I think there is some danger of
backlash against science as the main engine of human progress and an
important arrow in our quiver for dealing with HIV and AIDS."
David
Ps. We have a viewpoint article on access to AIDS treatment in Science, 23
June 2000.
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David Steven
River Path Associates
61a West Borough
Wimborne
Dorset UK
BH21 1LX
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T +44 (0)1202 849993
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