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Even Canadian Government says Toronto AIDS Conference Irrational

Critic says facts reveal "almost everybody in Canada is safe from AIDS"

By Hilary White

TORONTO, August 21, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Canada’s federal Health Minister, Tony Clement, expressed his frustration with the Toronto International AIDS Conference saying the meeting was so politically charged it was “becoming a place where you couldn’t have a rational discussion.”

Speakers at the AIDS Conference, heavily covered by the world’s media, charged the Canadian government with indifference to AIDS sufferers when Prime Minister Stephen Harper was unable to make an appearance. Clement was speaking to an audience at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, where he announced the creation of a government-funded centre to study the root social causes of disease.

Clement said the Conference had gone “way over the top,” in placing itself as a political platform. He cited a case in which a conference speaker had called for the resignation of the South African Health Minister.

Clement’s criticisms of the Conference were echoed in Thursday’s National Post in a piece by Fr. Raymond de Souza, a priest of the Archdiocese of Kingston and a regular columnist for the Post. He wrote that the Conference was more about a self-congratulatory cult of celebrity than about AIDS and touted a one-sided approach to AIDS that has more to do with politics than the disease.

“In the midst of Stephen Lewis lauding Bill Clinton praising Bill Gates congratulating Bill Clinton paying tribute to Stephen Lewis,” De Souza wrote, “it is hard to know what to make” of the AIDS Conference.

De Souza pointed to the overt vitriol against the Catholic Church that has characterized the tone of past AIDS Conferences, which, he says, is odd because, “over 25% of all centres worldwide that treat people with AIDS are Catholic or Catholic-supported.” 

“Without Catholic institutions, millions of AIDS patients would simply be left to die alone and often in squalor,” he wrote.

Another article in the same issue of the National Post by the Hudson Institute’s Michael Fumento, provided plenty of damning statistics to expose the self-serving manipulations of the AIDS industry.

Fumento notes that worldwide AIDS spending, averaging $1.7-billion between 2002-2004, is expected to grow to $10-billion in 2007. “The size of that pie” he charges, “and the desire to have a slice of it, is all you need to know to understand how the Toronto conference could attract a stunning 24,000 attendees who have been rightly labelled ‘the AIDS industry.’"

The article adds that “the current AIDS budget swamps spending on malaria and tuberculosis, which together kill about twice as many people annually as AIDS does.” Fumento points out that “Antiretroviral therapy for AIDS cures no one” and costs $300-$1200  per year in the Third World while “TB can be cured with $65 of medicine” and “Malaria in Africa and Asia can be prevented for a pittance by spraying DDT”.

Fumento charges that the rate and significance of AIDS infection has often been grossly exaggerated. He notes that the total of 272 new AIDS cases diagnosed in Canada in 2005 “is completely overshadowed by virtually any fatal disease you can name. Cancer, for example, struck about 137,000 Canadians last year. Breast cancer alone, at about 19,000 new cases, afflicted about 290 times more people than were diagnosed with AIDS.”  “Fact is”, he proclaims, contrary to attempts to make AIDS “everybody’s disease”, “almost everybody in Canada is safe from AIDS.”

While even some AIDS activists in Toronto last week called it a “Hollywood” conference more interested in celebrity and political grandstanding than in the disease. Ugandan AIDS fighter, Martin Sempa, told LifeSiteNews.com that the political nature of the AIDS industry makes it easy for activists to use the issue as a platform for political attacks.

The condom dogma also makes the Catholic Church in general, and Pope Benedict XVI in particular, a favourite target of mainstream media. During the Toronto Conference, the UK’s Telegraph issued an ultimatum to the Pope, coming within a hair’s breadth of calling him a murderer for his opposition to condoms.

In an editorial titled, “The Pope should slow the spread of Aids,” the Telegraph made the now usual claim that dissent from the Catholic teaching by a small number of left-leaning European Cardinals means the “Catholic teaching is not …set in stone.” “Several cardinals” the editorial said, “are lobbying Pope Benedict XVI for a policy change.”

“As Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Belgium has put it, the argument for an adjustment to Catholic teaching on condoms can be summed up in four words: Thou shalt not kill.”

Raymond De Souza pointed to the first AIDS hospice in New York, founded in 1985 by Mother Teresa and still staffed by the Missionaries of Charity.  In Africa, the greatest bulk of the work of caring for AIDS sufferers is being done by church-based NGO’s.

While a dozen countries have AIDS rates over 10%, statistics show that in most cases, countries of Africa with the highest percentage Catholic population also have among the lowest rates of AIDS in Africa, second only to those countries with large Muslim populations.

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
AIDS a Glamorous Multi-Billion Dollar Industry – Sufferers Forgotten
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/aug/06081704.html

Visit the Catholic AIDS Action website:
http://www.caa.org.na/

Read Fr. De Souza’s column, reprinted with permission by the
Catholic Civil Rights League:
http://www.ccrl.ca/doc/Of%20morals%20and%20medicine.doc

Read Michael Fumento’s column
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=073d214f-0c19-4510-bcee-e21657c...

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