Is there a health crisis?

Letters

Vol. 10 No. 12 · 23 June 1988

From Michael Fitzpatrick

In his review of recent books about Aids and medical politics (LRB, 19 May), Roy Porter should have declared an interest. The Wellcome Foundation, for which he is a lecturer, has recently republished the British Medical Association’s handbook on Aids. The company’s drug salesmen are currently using this handbook, together with a specially-made video, as promotional aids in peddling their wares around doctors’ surgeries. Is there a conspiracy between Wellcome’s academic historian and its drug reps to savage books which challenge the prevailing consensus about Aids? I doubt it. As Don Milligan and I wrote in The Truth about the Aids Panic – and contrary to the account given in Porter’s review – ‘we do not regard the Aids panic as a conspiracy, but as something much more insidious.’ The British Government has latched onto a real, if relatively small, Aids problem in Britain as a key part of its drive to promote a return to conventional morality. Various interest groups – doctors, priests, newspaper editors, television producers, drugs companies and even medical historians – have quite spontaneously, and for their own reasons, endorsed the Government’s campaign.

Porter accuses us of ‘epidemiological ignorance’, yet fails to substantiate this accusation with a single example. But let’s follow his own advice and ‘look at the date stamp’. Our book was published in February 1987. It challenged the established epidemiological wisdom that Aids was likely to spread rapidly among heterosexuals in Britain. The number of reported cases of Aids acquired by heterosexual transmission in Britain rose from five in February 1987 to nine in February 1988. In other words, our contention that ‘there is no good evidence that Aids is likely to spread rapidly in the West among heterosexuals’ has been vindicated by the epidemiological evidence of the past 12 months.

Porter further accuses me of irresponsibility. He sneers at the disclosure in the book of the fact that I am a GP, as though that is irrelevant to its content. Yet it is as a GP that I have had to cope over the past couple of years with a weekly toll of anxiety and misery generated by the Aids panic. The ‘worried well’ are now recognised to be much more numerous than those suffering from the Aids virus. I consider that it is my responsibility to point out how fear of a disease that is mercifully rare and difficult to contract in Britain is being stirred up and exploited for political ends. It is also important to point out that the intensifying oppression of homosexuals which results from the Aids panic can only encourage the spread of the virus among gay men, who constitute nearly 90 per cent of Aids cases. The fact that your reviewer thinks it is enough to dismiss reasoned opposition to Aids hysteria with low-life jibes, sneers and assertions itself reveals the climate of irrationality that surrounds discussion of the issue in Britain today.

Michael Fitzpatrick
Barton House Health Centre, London NW1