The AIDSTruth Rats Scatter

Now that Dr. James Murtagh has unwittingly exposed the corrupt South African group AIDSTruth for what it is, the pseudoscientists are desperately trying to distance themselves from Murtagh - like rats from a ship.

In their latest release, the truthers find Murtagh’s behavior repugnant and declare that "the Cape High Court found no evidence" that the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) “has any financial relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.” Murtagh's emails speak for themselves.

While that might be technically correct, TAC regularly receives funding from the Treatment Action Group (TAG), which accepts generous funding from companies like Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb and DeBeers - which just happens to employ tens of thousands of low wage diamond miners in South Africa.

But after a year or more association with Celia Farber's co-defendants, it’s hard to imagine why they think they can deny collaborating with him. Check out this email from truther Brian Foley PhD (Los Alamos National Laboratory) to Murtagh and Cornell truther John Moore PhD (Page 33):

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian T. Foley" btf@lanl.gov
To: "Jim Murtagh" <jmurtag@mindspring.com> (OTHER SSI MEMBERS REDACTED)
Cc: jpm2003@med.cornell.edu
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 10:15 AM
Subject: Re: Clark's report against Kevin

Dear Friends,

I am shocked. Clark has completed his "investigation," and is issuing a report in the name of SSI that I believe very few SSI members (if any) would agree with. I don't think Clark wrote this. He doesn't have enough command of the English language, so someone ghost wrote it.

Clark assures me that he wrote it himself. He called me at home to discuss it, and then wrote to the ombudsperson of Los Alamos National Laboratory anc copied me…

As sloppy as their latest release is, you’d think they were conducting scientific research or hiring security guards to compose Robert Gallo’s life story.

On a related note…

In my report from last Sunday, I cited Jock McCulloch’s comprehensive history of the African Mining History (1880~2013). His report appears to be the blueprint of what eventually produced the methods and motives to kill workers who suffered from mining-related lung diseases. If corrupt doctors misdiagnose these diseases as HIV and AIDS they can blame, poison and kill their liabilities before their dying workforce can sue.

More excerpts:

The Mbini case is about the fate of one man but it also has a wide frame of reference. There is much undiagnosed and uncompensated silicosis among gold miners. As the Chief Inspector of Mines, Mavis Hermanus, has commented: ‘The unchanged rate of silicosis is a current problem in the mining industry. Data from 1975 to 2001 indicate that we are not making progress against the disease.’ According to Eric Geilitshana, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Secretary for Health and Safety, 40 percent of South African gold miners have silicosis, an estimate consistent with the recent epidemiology. Mbini may well be the first step in a massive class action involving hundreds of thousands of miners from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Swaziland, Mozambique, and Botswana, all of which supplied labour to Anglo American. If those claims eventuate, the corporation’s liability could be as high as R50 billion. Even if unsuccessful, Mbini may well bring a change to work practices in South Africa’s mines…

This article examines the history of silicosis and in particular the question as to how a pandemic of disease could have remained invisible for over half a century. The narrative focuses upon the relationship between capital, labour, and medical researchers, and in particular the collusion between state agencies and employers. It reviews the Mbini case in terms of the history of the gold mines, the medical knowledge of disease and the operation of workers’ compensation schemes…

The Rand mines are the largest and deepest in the world and historically they have been among the most dangerous. At the beginning and close of the twentieth century those mines faced a crisis over silicosis. The first crisis ran from 1896 to 1912; the second began in 1996. Both have threatened the industry’s survival…

The Rand system of dust sampling has a corollary in the so-called Threshold Limit Values (TLVs) which were used widely in the US to measure the risk of silicosis in foundries and mines. Such thresholds were based on the assumption that if exposure to toxins could be kept below a certain level, then workplaces would be safe. The idea of TLVs appealed to industry. Specific hazards could be negotiated between experts appointed by employers and government, thereby shifting debate about risk away from public scrutiny. Trade unions were perceived to have no scientific expertise and therefore no role to play in such discussions… to compensate only 10 percent of the workforce proved expensive…

The intimate relationship between the Chamber of Mines, the Department of Mines and the research community is epitomized by the Institute. Those three groups shared the same research focus and a common source of funding through mine revenue. They also shared the same personnel, as key researchers moved between one sector and the other. The same men served on state commissions and departmental committees, and represented the Chamber at public inquiries. That made it difficult for an individual to confront the mining houses over the dust hazard…

In 1926 (Anthony) Mavrogordato wrote a 120-page review of the medical literature on silicosis reflecting upon the issues of risk and disease. He identified three key problems on the Rand: the difficulties of diagnosis, the synergy between silicosis and tuberculosis, and the intractability of the dust burden. He noted that more cases of silicosis were picked up at autopsy than during routine X-rays. For example, a man killed in an accident after only three years underground would at autopsy show definite signs of fibrosis even though he was at the time of death in apparent good health. That finding suggested that the disease rates might be higher than was officially recognized, an observation which subsequent research confirmed. Mavrogordato also believed that the minor changes to lung tissue found at autopsy, but invisible in X-rays, greatly increased the risk of tuberculosis. That in turn suggested that tuberculosis was being exported to the labour-sending areas, a problem the industry has always denied…

Mavrogordato’s paper suggests it was virtually impossible to reduce dust to a level at which silicosis and tuberculosis would not occur. The use of water to lay dust increased the chances of tuberculosis. Even sub-clinical silicosis increased a miner’s susceptibility to infection… The underlying cause was the perennial problem of dust and disease…

The Leon Commission of 1995 was held at a difficult time for the industry, which was not keen to see the issue of occupational disease debated at a public forum. The Chamber was reluctant to discuss silicosis and its initial submission on lung disease was two and a half pages in length. The Commission found that silica dust levels on the gold mines had been unchanged for more than fifty years and suggested the same may be true of the incidence of silicosis. This was a significant finding. In 1997 a joint initiative by the ILO, the WHO and the South African government to eliminate silicosis was established. It features a Tripartite Committee comprising workers (the NUM and the Mines Workers’ Union), employers (Chamber of Mines) and the government (Departments of Health and Minerals and Energy). The Committee’s brief is to oversee the eradication of silicosis by the year 2013. That is going to be a difficult task…

… the National Institute of Occupational Health (NIOH) in Johannesburg and… University of Cape Town has identified a pandemic of hitherto undiagnosed and uncompensated silicosis involving hundreds of thousands of miners. In 1997, T. W. Steen et al… found a rate of silicosis of between 27 and 31 percent; of that number, almost 7 percent had life-threatening fibrosis… Anna Trapido’s study on Libode confirmed these data. Trapido estimates the prevalence of pneumoconiosis at between 22 and 36 percent. Yet only 2 percent of miners at Libode with silicosis have received compensation…

Churchyard et al… found the prevalence of previously undiagnosed silicosis at between 18 and 23 percent. Jill Murray estimates that up to 60 percent of miners will eventually develop silicosis. The synergy between silicosis and a number of infectious diseases makes the problem all the greater. As the Chief Inspector of Mines, Mavis Hermanus, commented in 1998: ‘Dust exposure drives a four-fold increase in tuberculosis (TB), while TB accelerates HIV infection and AIDS symptoms, which in turn accelerate the symptoms of TB… The under-reporting of silicosis raises the spectre of a backlog of compensation claims. Steen et al. found that the Medical Bureau for Occupational Diseases (MBOD) underestimates the rate of silicosis by a factor of between four and ten. That is in line with Trapido, who suggests there are 196,000…

… Extrapolating from Churchyard, 80,000 men currently employed on the mines are eligible for compensation. Given the rate at which the workforce has replaced itself over the past twenty years, there should be a further 200,000 compensatable cases in the neighbouring states of Southern Africa. Neil White costs the shortfall in compensation at around R2.8 billion. Under common law, to those figures must be added the costs of pain and suffering, the areas in which working-class plaintiffs usually have the strongest claims for compensation…

The Mbini case raises the question as to how such a disease burden could have gone unrecognized for so long. There are parallels with the scandals over silicosis and black lung in the US, and more recently with miners’ asthma and bronchitis in the UK. In both those cases recognition of occupational injury and then compensation took decades to achieve. In South Africa the labour markets, the economic importance of gold mining and the political environment have made recognition even more difficult. The system of medicals at the Bureau was never adequate to identify first stage silicosis among white miners. The Departments of Health and Mines in Pretoria enjoyed a monopoly over the data on disease, and took no interest in black workers once they had left the industry. The lack of biomedical care in rural South Africa and in the labour-sending states of Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique further obscured the incidence of silicosis. Under-funded and under-resourced health systems were at their worst in dealing with a chronic disease for which there is no easy diagnosis and no treatment. Under minority rule the state was reluctant to give researchers access to labour-sending communities. When Marianne Felix from the NIOH began pioneering work among asbestos miners at Mafefe in the late 1980s, she encountered resistance from the Departments of Health and Mines. The same happened five years later when Anna Trapido began work on silicosis in the Eastern Cape.

This is the same resistance met by scientists and journalists today who ask questions about the existence of HIV and AIDS causation.

In 1989, Peter Duesberg presented indisputable evidence that HIV does not attack cells or cause AIDS – if HIV exists at all. The latest AIDSTruth press release proves their willingness to lie. The Mbini Case provides us with more evidence that HIV is, and always has been, a disease that was designed to save Africa's deadly mining industry.