Rian Malan, writing in the Spectator (U.K.), blows the lid off of a major scientific/public health scandal, which has had far—reaching effects, and will end—up costing possibly millions of lives. The death toll, and therefore the relative seriousness of AIDS in Africa, it turns out, has been vastly oversold. Just as Oprah Winfrey once told her viewers that 'one in five heterosexuals will be dead of Aids' by 1990, and no less an authority than Madonna assured us that AIDS is an equal—opportunity killer, once again the world's most political disease has been hyped—up by greedy profiteers and politically—motivated hucksters, anxious to divert public monies to purposes which benefit themselves.

President Bush, no doubt out of high motives, has committed the United States to spend $15 billion to fight African AIDS, on the strength of the exaggerated computer models Malan carefully compares with the actual death and population statistics. Malan, working in Cape Town, South Africa, finds that actual deaths appear to be a relatively small fraction of what we have been told. We have, in short, been sold a fraudulent bill of goods.

If we lived in a world of infinite resources, such exaggerations would be deplorable but not serious. However, in the real world, money devoted to AIDS is diverted from other public health applications, such as tuberculosis, dysentery, river blindness, sanitation, and other prosaic killers. Underinvestment in treating these old—fashioned maladies will kill actual human beings in Africa and elsewhere. Overinvestment in AIDS, in other words, is itself a killer plague. Posted by Thomas 12 13 03