(no subject)

[rivka]

Because AIDS conspiracy theories are part of my grant application, I've been reading a bunch of them. This is very much not my idea of a good time.

I knew, vaguely, that AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore's daughter died of AIDS a couple of years ago. I didn't know the full story - for example, that she hired a toxicologist who is on the "medical advisory board" of her denialist organization (although he's not an M.D. or any other kind of physician) to review the autopsy report and come up with an alternative theory for how the child died.

The guy had a rough time battling with the facts - it's not easy to explain away the fact that the kid's lungs were full of pneumocystis carinii (PCP pneumonia) and her brain was full of p24, the core HIV protein - and in fact, his alternative theory has been exhaustively rebutted by blogger Nick Bennett, who has an MD in pediatrics and a Ph.D. in the molecular biology of HIV. Here's all that Maggiore could come up with as a response:

The blogger, who is well known to us (Nick Bennett) states on his website “I have never recieved funding from any pharmaceutical company that makes HIV antivirals. I do not get and have not ever been paid to do this.” This is true, but it’s cleverly worded to avoid the embarrassing fact (that he admitted to me in an email in December, 2005) that “I was funded, on paper, by Astrazeneca for my PhD”.

Astra Zeneca does not make AIDS drugs, but they have still purchased Nick’s loyalty for pharmaceutical solutions in general. And AstraZeneca probably benefits from AIDS in many other ways, as AIDS patients are generally (over)dosed with a variety of drugs apart from antiretrovirals.

"I can't believe," I said to Michael, "that even after AIDS killed her daughter, she's still clinging so hard to denialism." And then I realized: of course. It makes perfect sense. No matter how far-fetched the theories she has to endorse, no matter how mountainous the evidence on the other side, no matter how the discrepancies mount up, she has to keep believing. Because if she doubts, even for a moment, then she has to accept her responsibility for her child's death.

I told you this wasn't my idea of a good time.


Blogger Dean Esmay was apparently a big Maggiore supporter when the story broke. One of the commenters on his site, someone named Elizabeth Reid, had two extremely cogent comments that sum up the discrepancies well:

Comment #1: To explain the findings via some other mechanism than HIV infection, Al-Bayati has to invoke a number of other low-probability events, all occuring simultaneously. She started off in complete good health although she was very small for unrelated reasons, then she got an atypical parvovirus infection (no characteristic rash, unusually serious illness in a child who has been asserted to be exceptionally healthy), then she had a rare anaphylactic reaction to a medication which was not alleviated by epinephrine injection and proved fatal, all while coincidentally fighting off a P. carinii infection so rarely seen in healthy individuals that presence of the infection is usually considered diagnostic of immune dysfunction, and then the tests of her brain lesions displayed a false positive to HIV.

Comment #2: According to everything I've read, Maggiore and her husband have what could be termed a deep distrust of the medical profession. The kids weren't vaccinated, she treated her own possible cervical cancer with juice, supplements, and regular exercise, and of course she thinks they're all completely wrong about HIV/AIDS.

The accounts of Maggiore's daughter's illness as told by those who are sympathetic to her make it sound pretty minor (Dean has described it as 'the sniffles and a low grade fever'), presumably in contrast to the suddenness of her decline and death. However, during the course of this minor illness, Maggiore took her daughter to doctors four times.

Why would a woman who has such a pronounced distrust for conventional medical treatments take her daughter to a doctor for 'a runny nose'? Why would she give her child amoxicillin for an simple minor ear infection when she treated her own potential cancer with juice? I'm a total believer in my pediatrician, but I don't take my own child in for runny noses and low-grade fevers unless they're unusual or persistent. I'm not slamming her for this, because there's nothing wrong with being concerned, but it does make me wonder if a) the illness wasn't more pronounced all along than we're being led to believe, or b) Maggiore had some other reason to be concerned about her daughter's health.

Comments

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

How old was her daughter? In New Zealand it's very likely that Maggiore would have been charged with criminal negligence, or failing to provide the necessities of life.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

She was only three years old.

Maggiore could have been charged in the U.S. as well, but the District Attorney's office decided not to press charges.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Oh for frick's sake. If ever there was a case when charges _should_ have been pressed. But I suppose she's "suffered enough."

[tracicle.livejournal.com]

The question is whether she has learned from this and whether Charlie, her 8-year-old, is safe in her care. I get the impression that her stance on HIV/AIDS hasn't changed at all, in which case I should hope her child will be at least tested for HIV and at best removed from her care.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

He has been tested (since his sister's death, and, I believe, under threat of Child Protective Services involvement), and he's HIV negative.

There's only about a 25% chance that the child of an HIV-positive mother will be HIV-positive. In Maggiore's case, that risk would increase because she breastfed both kids, but would also probably decrease because, given her obvious good health, her viral load is presumably pretty low.