Doling Out Thoughts on Medicine and Politics
November 26th, 2006Picked up the Chicago Reader at the train station yesterday and read it as I got to my destination (dinner with a friend). The title of the feature story was interesting enough, but once I read the piece — “Magic Bullet or Menace“ about an “AIDS spray” that kills the disease, and its “creator’s” story — I was grateful for the Chicago Reader whose tireless investigative work matches that of many mainstream newspapers.
Samuel Evans is a military man who is also a journeyman, in sports terms, never accomplishing very much in any one field and moving from profession to profession. Reading about him, he comes off as a hustler and nothing more, and that impression cements when you get to his AIDS spray. He says it’s for sale in some countries, but there haven’t even been shipments to them; he talks about his spray being scientifically proven to work, but he adds that it’s in China and pretends that Chinese scientists are comparable to American ones. (A controversial statement to make, I know, but there’s a reason that the Chinese government doesn’t hold their scientists to our standards.) To me, this is the key passage:
He says that a team of researchers, including gynecologists, urologists, and biochemists, went to work on his idea and that by 1998 they’d developed a microbicide spray people could use to coat the vagina or penis before having sex. He also says a series of lab tests determined the spray was “effective in destroying HIV in under 30 seconds.” Anna Forbes says successful lab tests don’t mean much: “Soap and water kills HIV in a test tube. It doesn’t mean it’s capable of killing it in humans.”
But Evans says Genvia was tested further on 100 people at Gulou Hospital in Nanjing for about a year, adding, “I don’t absolutely know whether that one year was 10 months or 12 months.” He also says that in 2000 he received a certificate from the Chinese Academy of Medicine stating that Genvia had “passed all standards” for use as a “topically applied disinfectant” effective against HIV. He plans to post the test data on a Web site so other researchers can scrutinize it, but the AIDS Foundation’s Jim Pickett doesn’t understand why Evans has waited six years. “With a valid trial you want that data out there,” he says. “You’re dying to get it out there.” Evans says the trial was valid and the quality of the testing was “extremely close” to what would have been done in the U.S. He adds, “Anyone who thinks the tests weren’t as thoroughly done is wrong.”
Later on, he says that the reason he doesn’t do these tests in America is because American scientific standards are set far higher than the Chinese and it would cost him millions and millions dollars more. If he already did it “extremely close” to American standards, why was it so much cheaper? Maybe because he’s a liar and a scam-artist who is going to get a ton of people infected with AIDS when they find out the hard way that his spray doesn’t work. Assuming that he ever gets his spray on the market anywhere in the world.
Sam Brownback, the Conservative Senator from Kansas, is planning a run for President. Believe it or not, I think he has a better chance than any of the other Republicans to win the nomination but he reminds me of a zesty Bob Dole. I’d urge you to ignore the word zesty, though, as being a reminder of Bob Dole isn’t a good thing no matter what adjective you put in before it.