I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That (34 page)

But people working on the front line of HIV testing are often told to ask about risk behaviours during a test, because testing is a great opportunity to educate people on prevention. What’s more – if you’re interested in the statistics of testing – knowledge about your pre-test likelihood of having a condition also helps the tester to correctly interpret any diagnostic test: because, as we have covered in this column, for terrorist screening, for predicting violence in psychiatric patients, indeed for anything, the likelihood of a false positive with any test is higher where the population prevalence of a condition is low. In any case, HIV tests are so reliable that in 2007 an HIV-negative woman won $2.5 million in damages after she was treated for Aids without a proper diagnosis, since there was no excuse for the mistake that her doctor made.

The show goes on. We see Neville Hodgkinson, the
Sunday Times
health correspondent who drove that paper’s denialist reporting in the 1990s. There is Peter Duesberg, who you will remember from when academic publishers Elsevier forcibly withdrew an article by him in one of their journals.

Then there is an interview with Christine Maggiore, who talks about her difficult decision to go against medical advice by refusing Aids medication, and how much better she feels as a result. What the film doesn’t tell you, oddly, is that Christine Maggiore’s daughter Eliza Jane died of Aids and PCP pneumonia three years ago, at the age of three; and, as I reported nine months ago, Christine Maggiore herself died two days after Christmas 2008 of pneumonia, aged fifty-two: this is finally acknowledged in the last two seconds of the film, at the end of the lengthy credits, in tiny letters.

Do you give idiots a wider audience when you respond to them? Are they marginal and irrelevant? I’d like to believe that they are. But the duping of Caspar Melville (who has
since recanted
), and the attention-seeking smugness of the Cambridge Film Festival, both suggest otherwise. I’ll never know the right way to deal with any of these people, and I’ll always welcome advice.

Aids Denialism
at the
Spectator

Guardian
, 24 October 2009

A lot of strange stuff can fly in under the claim that you are ‘simply starting a debate’. You may remember the Aids denialist documentary
House of Numbers
from three weeks ago
. Since then, it has had a fabulous run. The organisers of the London Raindance Film Festival explained that they were proud to show it, and a
senior programmer appeared
on YouTube saying they had gone through the film at fifteen-second intervals, finding no inaccuracies at all.

That’s pretty good for a film which suggests that HIV doesn’t cause Aids, but antiretroviral drugs do, or poverty, or drug use; that HIV probably doesn’t exist; that diagnostic tools don’t work; that Aids is just a spurious basket of symptoms invented to sell antiretroviral drugs; and the treatments don’t work anyway.

Here is
Fraser Nelson
, editor of the
Spectator
, promoting
a
Spectator
event
next Wednesday where this film will be screened: ‘Is it legitimate to discuss the strength of the link between HIV and Aids? It’s one of these hugely emotive subjects, with a fairly strong and vociferous lobby saying that any open discussion is deplorable and tantamount to Aids denialism. Whenever any debate hits this level, I get deeply suspicious.’

Of course people will have concerns. Despite international outcry, from 2000 to 2005 South Africa implemented policies based on the belief that HIV does not cause Aids. The government refused to roll out adequate antiretroviral therapy to their dying population. It has since been estimated
in two separate studies
that around 350,000 people lost their lives unnecessarily to Aids in South Africa during this period.

‘Teach the controversy’ is a technique beloved of cranks, from American creationists to anti-vaccination campaigners (with whom Fraser Nelson
has also, oddly, flirted
). They know that in our modern media, truth is triangulated, halfway between the two most extreme views: doubt alone gets you close to winning.

But debate is also good. So what kind of debate will the
Spectator
be hosting? It advertises a panel of ‘leading medical authorities’. There are four people on this panel.

One is Lord Norman Fowler. He is not a ‘leading medical authority’.

Charles Geshekter
is a Professor of African History from the University of Chicago. He says there is no Aids epidemic in Africa, just poverty, and that belief in the epidemic is a product of racism and ‘Western sexual stereotypes’. In fact he calls it
‘The Plague That Isn’t’
, and was on President Thabo Mbeki’s notorious Aids Advisory Panel in South Africa in 2000.

Beverly Griffin is an
emeritus professor
at Imperial College, from the field of virology, but not HIV, who
is quoted by the virusmyth
website as having said in the 1990s that HIV may not cause Aids. Her views may now have changed. I hope they have. I have emailed her, and hope to hear back.

Lastly, Dr Joe Sonnabend is a retired American doctor who was greatly involved in the treatment of people with Aids, but was also long regarded by many in the Aids denialist community as a fellow traveller. He too has said in the past that the link between HIV and Aids is unproven. More recently he has distanced himself from this view.

I’m sure all these people are erudite and accomplished, but this is not a panel of ‘leading medical authorities’ on the question of whether HIV causes Aids. It’s also fair to say that, with the exception of Norman Fowler, all the
Spectator
’s panellists have disputed the mainstream consensus on Aids at one stage or another. I’m not saying that is unacceptable, or presuming their current position. But they may not reflect the overwhelming consensus – no dirty word – that HIV causes Aids, and that antiretroviral medication is an imperfect but
overall beneficial treatment
.

And then there is the film. We can’t rehash its flaws, but I would ask Fraser Nelson about one scene. Christine Maggiore appears throughout, talking emotively, explaining her choice not to take Aids medication, and saying that this is why she is alive.

But Christine Maggiore is dead, Fraser. The film tells you that, but only in tiny letters at the very end, and it says no more. She died of pneumonia, aged fifty-two, and her daughter died of untreated Aids, aged three. Because of her beliefs about Aids, Christine Maggiore did not take medication which has been proven to reduce the risk of HIV transmission to unborn children during pregnancy. Her daughter, Eliza Jane, was not tested for HIV during her short life. Then she died, aged three, of Aids.

Children don’t often drop dead aged three. Adults don’t often die aged fifty-two. These facts should be front and centre stage, in large, bold letters, scrolling across the screen as Maggiore speaks out passionately against Aids treatments. I can’t see how a film like this can possibly be a helpful starting point for an informed debate. It’s not ‘controversial’, it’s pointlessly misleading. ‘Starting a debate’ is fine. With this film, and with these panellists, the
Spectator
has framed a very odd event indeed.

ELECTROSENSITIVITY

Wi-Fi Wants
to Kill Your Children … But Alasdair Philips of Powerwatch Sells the Cure!

Guardian
, 26 May 2007

Won’t somebody, please, think of the children? Three weeks ago I received this email from a science teacher. ‘I’ve just had to ask a BBC
Panorama
film crew not to film in my school or in my class because of the bad science they were trying to carry out,’ it began, then went on to describe in perfect detail the
Panorama
programme
which aired this week. This show was on the suppressed dangers of radiation from wi-fi networks, and how they are harming children. There was no science in it, just some ‘experiments’ the programme-makers did for themselves, and some duelling experts.
Panorama
disagreed with the WHO expert, so he was smeared for not being ‘independent’ enough, and working for a phone company in the past. I don’t do personal smears. But
Panorama
started it. Independence is clearly very important to them. How independent were the BBC, and the ‘experiments’ they did?

They had twenty-eight minutes, I have seven hundred words.

In the show, you can see them walking around Norwich with a special ‘radiation monitor’. Radiation is their favourite word, and they use it thirty times, once a minute, although wi-fi is ‘radiation’ in the same sense that light is. ‘Ooh, it’s well into the red there,’ says reporter Paul Kenyon, holding up the detector. That sounds bad.

Well into the red on what? It’s tricky to calibrate measurements, and to decide what to measure, and where the cut-off should be for ‘red’.
Panorama
’s readings were ‘well into the red’ on ‘the COM Monitor’, a special piece of detecting equipment designed from scratch and built by
Alasdair Philips
of
Powerwatch
: the man who leads the campaign against wi-fi. His bespoke device is manufactured exclusively for his own outfit, Powerwatch, and he will
sell one to you
for just £175. Alasdair decided what ‘red’ meant on
Panorama
’s device. That’s not very independent.

Panorama
did not disclose where this detector came from. And they know that Alasdair Philips is no ordinary ‘engineer doing the readings’, because they told us in the show, but they didn’t tell the school that, as our science teacher says: ‘They wanted to take some measurements in my classroom, compare them to the radiation from a phone mast and film some kids using wireless laptops. They introduced “the engineer”, whom I googled.’

He found it was the same man who runs Powerwatch, the pressure group campaigning against mobile phones, wi-fi and ‘electrosmog’. As our science teacher explained, this man isn’t necessarily very independent. In Alasdair’s Powerwatch shop
you can buy
shielded netting for your windows at just £70.50 per metre, and special shielding paint at £50.99 per litre. To paint just one small, eleven-foot-square bedroom refuge in your house with Powerwatch’s products would require about ten litres of this special product, costing you £500.

When the children saw Alasdair’s Powerwatch website, and the excellent picture of the insulating
mesh beekeeper hat
that he sells (£27) to ‘protect your head from excess microwave exposure’, they were astonished and outraged.
Panorama
were calmly expelled from the school.

So what about
Panorama
’s classroom experiment? It wasn’t very well designed, as was pointed out by a classroom full of children at the time. ‘They set about downloading the biggest file they could get hold of – so the wi-fi signal was working as powerfully as possible – and took the peak reading during that,’ says our science teacher. It was a great teaching exercise, and the children made valuable criticisms of
Panorama
’s methodology, including: ‘We’re not allowed to download files, so it wouldn’t be that strong,’ ‘Only a couple of classes have wi-fi,’ and ‘We only use the laptops a couple of times a week.’

Panorama
planned to have the man from Powerwatch talk to the students for about ten minutes about how wi-fi worked, and what effects it had on the human body. Then they were going to reveal the readings he had got from the mast, compare them to what Powerwatch had measured in the classroom, and film the kids’ reaction to the news. None of this sounds very independent.

‘Surprisingly enough, the readings in my room were going to be higher (about three times higher, I believe), and with the kids having been briefed by the engineer from Powerwatch first, they were hoping for a reaction that would make good telly.’ Sadly for them, it didn’t happen. ‘We told
Panorama
this morning that as they hadn’t been honest with us about what was going on and because of the bad science they were trying to pass off, we didn’t want them to film in the school or with our students.’ The images of children you see in the programme are just library footage.

I’m sure there should be more research into wi-fi. If
Panorama
had made a twenty-eight-minute programme about the scientific evidence, we would be discussing that. Instead they
produced ‘radiation’ scares
, and smears about whether people are ‘independent’. People in glass houses throw stones at their own risk.

A BBC spokesperson said: ‘Alasdair Philips is one of a handful of people with the right equipment to do this test. He was only used in this capacity and was not given an opportunity to interpret the readings let alone campaign on them in the film. We filmed the tests taken at the school and didn’t return.’

Why Don’t Journalists
Mention the Data?

British Medical Journal
, 16 June 2007

For two years now the British news media have been promoting the existence of a new medical condition, called electrosensitivity, or electromagnetic hypersensitivity. The story – or hypothesis – is that a wide range of symptoms are caused by acute exposure to electromagnetic signals, and that these symptoms are improved when the signal is removed.

The features of this condition include a range of problems which often end up being characterised by doctors as ‘medically unexplained symptoms’: tiredness, difficulty concentrating, headaches, nausea, bowel complaints, aches in the limbs, crawling sensations or pain in the skin, and more, for which no clear medical explanation is found. Such problems have existed since long before the appearance of ‘electrosensitivity’, and the absence of a clear cause is frustrating for both patients and doctors.