"And my guess is that our environment is much more toxic that theirs is."
I think it's all relative. The lack of controls in most nations of sub Sahara Africa is close to zero. Add to that, that the World Health Organization - after 30 years of banning DDT, reintroduced it to Africa to fight malaria.
From Wiki:
"Malaria afflicts between 300 million and 500 million people every
year. The World Health Organization estimates that around 1 million people die
of malaria and malaria-related illness every year, with about 90% of these
deaths occur in Africa, mostly to children under the age of 5."
I was sprayed multiple times from the air via U. S. DC3/C47 while in Korea - and am sure that aerial delivery is one of many methods they use in Africa today over a broad expanse. In Korea large cities were sprayed without consideration for the human population - by the U. S. government. I see pictures on the Internet of well protected humans spraying individual dwellings in Africa, though am sure that they use other means for agriculture - and it is used in agriculture along with other toxic chemicals that are banned in the west.
Mercury is another toxin that millions of people in South America, Asia, and Africa are exposed to as they work small and unsafe gold mines.
(from http://www.unido.org/doc/4571)
"Since the modern "gold rush" in developing countries began in the 1980s, millions of people have become artisanal miners, despite the risks of working in small tunnels or on steep hills and being exposed to mercury spilling mills, toxic vapours and explosives. The worldwide demand for gold is presently high, 44 percent above the total annual production of the world's gold mines. Unemployment and landlessness have driven people into small-scale gold mining. In Latin America, over a million people are directly involved in small-scale gold mining operations. If Africa and Asia are also considered, there could be as many as six million artisanal miners worldwide, among them many women."
Other toxic chemicals are used in the mining of gold besides mercury.
(from http://www.afrol.com/News2001/tan005_env_goldmine.htm)
"Misanet.com / IPS, 8 May - Tanzania is fast becoming one of Africa's leading gold producers - to the anxiety of villagers who say pollution from the mines is killing people, livestock, and wildlife. Toxic chemicals used to extract gold had leaked into their drinking water."
My point is - that third world countries with little control of corporations who have made deals with the governments are just as toxic as Western countries and probably even more so.
I feel very fortunate to have lived in a Third World country at the time I did. I learned a lot from it. At that time, Korea hadn't changed appreciably in over 2,000 years and I know that there are many people in the Third World who are living on resources just as scarce and even more primitive than what I saw and conditions just a toxic (raw sewage in every day use) as it was then, but with multi-national corporations polluting their world around them.
The human race is not treating the planet kindly.
"There's millions of dollars going to AIDS research from some many
different directions. From governments, music concerts, individuals, etc.
Just imagine what could possibly happen. If the big pharma solves the problem,
there will be no new income. If it is not just AIDS causing the symptoms in
Africa, they will never find the solution as long as they restrict their
research to Africa. They keep trying to find things that will "cure"
the symptoms. The virus seems to still be a mystery from what I read. Hopefully,
MMS will help in some fashion. If the virus mutates with drugs, it will not do
so with MMS. The problem might be that it is too aggressive and too fast
multiplying for MMS."
90% of the funding for AIDS research in the AIDS Research Alliance is from pharmaceuticals. That's not just a token contribution.
http://www.aidsresearch.org/about_us/articles/strategic_plan.html
In 2006, the Board of Directors of AIDS Research Alliance adopted a Strategic Plan that will serve as an organizational road map for the next five years. The data used to create the Plan was gathered from internal and external stakeholders, including current and past ARA staff, donors, board members, members of the Institutional Review Board and Scientific Advisory Committee, leaders in other scientific organizations, physicians specializing in HIV and people in the community at large who have relationships with ARA.
<snip>
Approximately 200 companies and organizations perform research for the treatment, prevention and eradication of HIV/AIDS. While pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms make up only 35% of these, they represent a majority of the influence in HIV/AIDS research and are responsible for approximately 90% of all spending in the field. The other 65% are mostly universities and large non-profit research institutions that focus on questions of basic research as opposed to drug development. Due to an overwhelming dependence on government funding, they are limited by regulatory burdens and a tendency toward institutional conservatism that keeps them from pushing their research beyond accepted political boundaries.
Due to an overwhelming dependence on government funding, they are limited by regulatory burdens and a tendency toward institutional conservatism that keeps them from pushing their research beyond accepted political boundaries.
The big problem is that the machinery is set in place to roll only in predetermined directions. The money comes with strings attached as to how it will be spent, i.e. pharmaceutical cures, 1980 definitions, terms of use etc. Donating money, even in large amounts, doesn't change the direction of how the "establishment" decides to spend the money. In fact, the large contributors, with their strings, will ensure that the top researchers, research programs and the major universties that potentially are involved will be preoccupied in focusing their efforts away from "alternative" resolutions to problems regarding public health. The masses will continue to be exploited.
Parmaceutical corps may be contributing what seems to be quite a bit, but its all really investment to ensure the direction doesn't change. And the diseases that are really caused by poverty, or poor sanitation, lack of immunization, lack of medical services, hunger and starvation are to remain classified as HIV/AIDS diseased cases, and treated as such with bogus, toxic drugs like AZT and the like.
The U.S Government does the same thing when is "donates" aid to foreign countries, when the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund prop up failing third world economies. What, do you really think that all that money is given away without strings? Its all part of the new world order to better exploit the masses. The US is no longer a democracy, if you haven't noticed, its a corporate dictatorship... and so many dictators all lined up in a row... forever plotting to keep future growth charts and record profits the priority, and maintaining control over humanity through injection of fear and keeping the masses minimally informed is the way to best accomplish this.
I have always declined donating money to such cancer causes for this very reason. Donating money, so the machinery will remain in place... and the masses will continue to be led to the slaughter. It sounds all so righteious and holy to donate, but come on, one really is just supporting the present system of exploiting the masses... looking for love in all the wrong places!
"…For all intents and purposes, the AIDS disease in Africa IS tuberculosis. So what the HIV theory of AIDS is actually asking us to accept is that sometime in the early 1980’s, all the traditional causes of those diseases, especially the infectious diseases, the disysenteries, and other areas: tuberculosis… which are, let’s face it, a symptom of poverty, or poor sanitation, lack of immunization, lack of medical services, hunger, starvation, were in fact replaced by HIV as the cause of all these diseases. I mean this is not an unlikely scenario." --Val Turner, MD, The Perth Group at [1:36:42] in Deconstructing The Myth Of AIDS by Gary Null.
"Where there have been good research reports, its clear that these HIV tests render a ludicurously high rate of false positives. When those tests are done among populations that already suffer from other kinds of endemic diseases, parisitic infections and malnutrition. There was a study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases done in 1994 for example, that made it quite clear that when they did these HIV tests on a population in Zaire where there was wide spread tuberculosis and leprosy, the test results in 70% of the cases were false positives. If the test results are 2 or 3% false positives, a test is basically invalid, it is useless in terms of epidemiology. Now, what exactly they would be testing positive for is another question entirely. However, the numbers of AIDS cases are run together with projections of HIV sero-prevalence, or HIV infection. Usually these tests are completed at a sexually transmitted disease clinic, maybe a hundred or 200 people are tested, where there done at an anti-NATO clinic where pregnant women are also tested. And from those samples then projections are made about the rate of HIV, the rate of HIV/AIDS. Which are customarily run together in Africa. Not only projections of HIV/AIDS of an entire country are made but, as they were at the AIDS conference in Geneva in 1998, projections can be made for an entire continent of 650 million people!" -- Charles Geshekter Prof of African Studies –California State University, at [1:37:06] in Deconstructing The Myth Of AIDS by Gary Null.