PEP:

When

just

one

campaign wont do...

The extent of AID$ Inc. UK's duplicity in responding to government demands - and the dire implications that are arising due to vital aspects of gay health policy being hijacked and dictated by faceless NHS bureaucrats and consultants - hit home on November 1, 2006.

That was the day the quarter century-old THT launched an aggressive campaign to promote the intervention antiretroviral cocktail PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis); a 28-day course of unproven, noxious AIDS drugs that are said to be able to prevent HIV developing in the body if started within 72 hours after exposure. Ever since, THT has been intensively blitzing major gay media, explicit hook-up sites and social venues with their PEP campaign, including Play Zone-endorsed sex clubs and saunas where PEP is being actively prescribed amid a backdrop of rampant unsafe sex and hard drug abuse, prompting some to speculate if PEP promotion is tied into the funding THT receives from the pharmaceutical industry.

"I met an HIV+ on the net who shocked me when he said he had fucked a guy without protection, came inside him, disclosed afterwards, and then advised him how to get PEP."

~ John Williams [Positive Nation]

"We can saturate the gay press with information about PEP and there will still be men who need to know about it who don't," emoted THT spin doctor Nutland with an urgency not afforded to warning the same target audience about safe sex, nor the significant risks of contracting HIV while high on crystal and other disinhibiting drugs, nor the devastation meth inflicts on the already compromised immune systems of HIVers, accelerating progression to full-blown AIDS and death. And at a time when:

• Record HIV transmission rates were being confirmed by government figures;

• 35% of under 21s were routinely engaging in unprotected sex with 40% unaware of their status, according to an 800-strong survey of gay teenagers;

• Manchester police confirmed the widespread infiltration of crystal meth into the UK's second largest gay scene;

• A well-known scene-goer was found dead in his London flat, choked on his vomit and surrounded by needles which he had used to inject meth, while a 25-

year-old overdosed on GHB at a London gay club and subsequently died.

"The analogy [of PEP] with the morning after pill is very interesting. We [in the US] were promised that was going to solve the problem when it became available over the counter. But I predicted five years ago that in fact it would worsen the problem of sexually transmitted infection."

~ Dr. Trevor Stammers [Sexual health expert]

The minority of MSM who genuinely - as opposed to recklessly or intentionally - slip-up and "need to know" about PEP is clearly out of all proportion to the majority who need to be:

• Frankly informed about the reality of what HIV is and how it is spread;

• Educated properly on how to apply condoms properly so that they don't break in the first place;

• Made fully aware of the dangers of correlated sexual health risks like hard drug use.

Implementing such campaigns would, of course, negate the need to obsessively promote PEP at both the expense of preventive vital campaigns and the exorbitant cost to the taxpayer via the NHS, which picks up the bill each time a course of PEP is prescribed although increasingly not for the reasons intended.

Of 30 men interviewed by Sigma Research who had used PEP, 50% said they'd sought it out following unprotected sex with someone they knew to be HIV+ as opposed to a condom breaking.

Of 185 people prescribed PEP at St. Mary's hospital in London between June 2005 and June 2006, 80% were MSM, nearly half of whom had had unprotected passive anal sex, mostly in casual situations. 8% of the PEP prescribed was for MSM who had taken PEP before, indicating a sizeable subgroup who are repeatedly trying to ‘manage’ high-risk sex. A study of repeat prescribers at the Mortimer Market and St Thomas’s STD clinics in London and Brighton, compared with 'one-offs', were found to be nearly four times as likely to have had further unsafe sex in the three months before requesting PEP and in the three months after and with twice as many partners, including known positive partners. None of the one-offs had sex with a known positive partner in the three months after PEP whereas 38% of repeat- prescribers did.

When asked why, in such a volatile climate, THT was targeting the consequences of unsafe sex instead of balancing its aggressive PEP strategy by also attacking the causes of HIV infection - and despite PEP's growing reputation as a "morning after pill"; its efficacy being questioned by leading AIDS doctors (how do you prove the reason for a negative outcome?); its uptake in the UK, despite the promotional overkill, being disappointingly low for the pharmaceutical companies concerned; users experiencing many of the chronic side effects associated with AIDS drugs that force many to stop using after a few days; PEP's ability to cause the body to develop resistance to future use of antiretrovirals; and each course costing the cash-strapped NHS over £600, amid major NHS cutbacks and the looming spectre of widescale cancer and HIV drug rationing - Nutland conceded: 

"THT is undertaking this work because national HIV prevention strategies and guidance articulates that PEP provision should be one part of the UK's HIV prevention response. This has been articulated by the Chief Medical Officer."

Clarifying his response, Nutland provided a "smoking gun" memo from the UK's Chief Medical Officer, Liam Donaldson, dated April 6, 2006 and issued to "All Chief Executives of Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities in England", highlighting the extent to which THT has morphed into a thinly-veiled state-funded quango; effectively a government front with a remit to protect commercial interests (i.e. it is no longer a gay men's health charity driven by gay men for the benefit of gay men). In the memo, the Chief Medical Officer states:

"I would...ask you to ensure that PEP is part of the spectrum of sexual health services for your local populations."

In an identical pact of allegiance to its chief paymaster, and as if to hammer the message home, GMFA launched its own PEP campaign in December 2006, effectively duplicating THT's PEP "fire extinguisher" ad in the same media and rotating on hook-up sites like Manhunt.

The extent to which government interference has been allowed to infect and and interfere with the direction of gay men's health in the UK via a conniving HIV sector - whose concentration of resources to aggressively promote a volatile, noxious pharmaceutical drug that few responsible MSM are ever inadvertently likely to need, while sending out a clear message to others that it can be used as a "quick fix" if taken a morning or two after engaging in reckless sex - is symptomatic of AID$ Inc. UK's blind arrogance and lack of accountability in confronting today's major health issues.

"Gay men's health requires a radical overhaul; from the government and pharmaceutical industry arm it’s become into an independent, self-funded entity run by gay men who won’t sell the rest of us down the river and allow our health to be compromised and jeopardised by outsiders with dubious interests and sinister agendas."

~ Paul Clifton [Pink Paper]

AID$ Inc. UK has long been steeped in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, pushing its drugs as far back as 1992 when AIDS was a largely untreatable disease. Then, THT's newly-appointed Chief Executive Nick Partridge - already embroiled in accusations of defrauding the charity's pension fund scheme, making front page headlines from The Pink Paper to the mainstream press - was branded an "AZT pimp" for engaging in an underhand deal with Glaxo Wellcome whereby THT was financially-renumerated for recommending high dosages of the chemotherapy drug- developed in the 1960s but not approved due to its high toxicity - to unwitting UK AIDS patients while mindful of the fact that AZT hastened death for many users; a revelation described at the time as "part and parcel of a program of genocide that is being conducted against gay men" amid claims that AZT's poisonous properties were themselves causing many of the symptoms associated with full-blown AIDS.

"GAG (Gays Against Genocide) were protesting because THT was producing a leaflet encouraging the use of AZT which was directly funded by Glaxo Wellcome, and we felt there was a real conflict of interest... THT was supposed to be supporting people with AIDS, but they were taking money to plug a drug which was toxic... It was killing people."

~ John Stevens [Positive Nation]

"The oft repeated claim that AZT 'extends life' is based on research that fully deserves to be called fraudulent."

~ John Lauritsen [Poison By Prescription: The AZT Story]

At its height, AZT - "the most toxic drug ever licensed for human consumption in the free world" - cost

$8,000-$12,000 per patient each year, generating over $1 billion annually for Glaxo Wellcome. A bottle of AZT that cost around $5 to make could be sold for over $500 by prescription, with most of the mark-up being subsidised by the taxpayer.

Such scandals didn't prevent Partridge receiving an OBE from the UK government in 1999 for "services to AIDS" and maintaining his lucrative

Chief Executive role, nor did they put a stop to THT receiving funding from Glaxo Wellcome (now GSK), which continues to this day.

"As a major force in HIV care, GlaxoSmithKline works closely with charitable organisations and healthcare professionals to help improve the outlook for communities in the UK and abroad. This year, as in previous years, GSK has committed further funds and resources towards this work."

~ GlaxoSmithKline [2007 UK HIV advert]

Meanwhile, GMFA now unashamedly has its snout in the trough of the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical giant Pfizer International, another manufacturer of AIDS drugs whose concern is not for the wellbeing of gay men so much as for the interests of its shareholders who demand that there continues to be a growing market for its lucrative antiretrovirals and combination therapies...

In May 2007, concerns about collusion between charities and Big Pharma were raised by the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the body that advises the NHS on which drugs to use. It warned charities to be wary of pharmaceutical company donations, and urged them to question the cost of drugs more. "Patient organisations need to think very carefully about why pharmaceutical companies are giving them money," said the institute's Chairman Sir Michael Rawlins, "and they have to make sure they are not beholden to a pharmaceutical company. I have yet to hear a patient organisation criticise a price of the drug. When they do that, they'll come into their own." [See The Disease Industry]

"It is a scientific fact that essentially all viruses can be partially or completely blocked by natural therapies. Ascorbate (Vitamin C) decreases the multiplication of viruses. A study published in the influential Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA in 1990 showed that Vitamin C in amounts that can be taken by people on a daily basis could block the replication of the HIV virus by more than 99.9%... Thus, for over an entire decade the pharmaceutical industry, the World Health Organisation and the medical establishment knew that there are natural, non-patentable alternatives to drugs. Moreover, these natural treatments are more effective than any current pharmaceutical approach in controlling the disease."

~ Dr. Matthias Rath, M.D.