Annual Report: 2005

The Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society was formed in February, 1999.

Communication

The society continues to maintain a phone number with voice mail (+1-403-220-0129), a post office box (Box 61037, Kensington Postal Outlet, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 4S6, Canada), a website (aras.ab.ca) and email (aras@aras.ab.ca).

We maintain informal links with AIDS rethinking organizations around the world, notably HEAL and Alive & Well in Los Angeles. We have continued to add links to sites that question the HIV/AIDS dogma. This year we added sites for Dr. Roberto Giraldo, The “Perth Group”, Dr. Mohammed Al-Bayati, Treatment Information Group (South Africa) and a number of Yahoo! and MSN discussion groups. Check our home page for the current list.

David Crowe, President of the society, continues to write on HIV/AIDS and other health issues, particularly for Alive magazine and RedFlagsWeekly.com. He gave a talk to a North American Midwive’s conference in September and to the ‘Knights of the Round Table’, a Calgary luncheon speaker club in December. A major scientific article on HIV and breastfeeding with several co-authors has been submitted (and rejected) to Lancet and the British Medical Journal, and is now under consideration by the Journal of Human Lactation.

Traffic continues to increase on our website. This past year it received from 7,409 to 16,657 hits per month, with significant higher traffic in December 2004 and January 2005. Every month had more hits than the busiest month in 2003! Visitors comes from all over the world – about 70 different countries in December. The top 10 countries in December were the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Australia, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, Thailand and France. Every continent except Antarctica!

The most popular pages are our compilations of scientific quotes and our new lists of dissidents and general AIDS quotes. These lists were compiled by Marcel Girodian, with assistance from others.

Also popular are articles that we have hosted, particularly those by investigative reporter Liam Scheff, who is a friend of the society. The ten most popular search strings that landed people at our site in December, 2004 (our busiest month) were “haart” [Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy], “aids quotes”, “liam scheff”, “direct observational therapy antiretroviral medications”, “hiv tests”, “highly active antiretroviral therapy”, “eia test strains hiv-1”, “hiv quotes”, “what is haart” and “hiv/aids quotes”.

We continued to mail out books (especially “What if Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?”), copies of articles and other papers upon request.

S.A.R.A. Awards

Membership

We have 162 members, including 127 with active email addresses (a good indicator of continued interest in the society). We have continued our policy of free memberships. 15% are from Alberta, 20% from the rest of Canada and the remaining 65% from other countries.

Financial

The treasurer of the society is Kathleen DeWitt Newell. At the end of our 2004 fiscal year (January 31^st 2005), the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society bank account held CDN$117.85 (our only assets). There were no liabilities. The major income was from various donations from individuals and corporations and reimbursements for copies of “What if Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?” or other publications. The major expenses were the Post Office Box (about $75/year), telephone (about $50/month) and website, email and domain name maintenance fees (www.aras.ab.ca), about $350 per year. More details are available in our financial report.

Education

One of our most important roles has been in education, the provision of information to allow people to make up their own minds.

A list of referenced quotations on AZT, the first and perhaps still the most commonly prescribed AIDS drug, describes the awesome toxicity and questionable effectiveness of this ‘therapy’ is available online (www.aras.ab/azt.html). A similar file on HAART (Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy) describes concerns about the many drugs that have more recently been used in various combinations (www.aras.ab/haart.html). A third file documents problems with HIV tests, and the use of ‘surrogate markers’, mainly CD4 cell counts and viral load, as a surrogate for actually monitoring health (www.aras.ab/test.html). Other pages provide information the connection between drug abuse and AIDS (www.aras.ab/drug.html) and information about the supposed methods of transmission of HIV (www.aras.ab/transmission.html). These enormous files of quotes are regularly updated.

A recent important addition has been a list of dissidents, currently well over 1,000 names. These are people with some academic credentials who have questioned some or all of the HIV=AIDS=Death dogma. This helps answer the question of whether it is just a few crackpots who ask questions like this. At the very least our critics will have to admit that it’s a whole pile of cracked pots!

Similarly, a list of public statements by scientists, doctors and others, sheds new light on the belief that few people are questioning, or that they are not asking intelligent questions.

Throughout the year we continue to receive emails from people, some quite desparate and paralyzed with fear. We can only offer them encouragement to question their death sentence, and information that might counter what their doctors are telling them.

Advocacy

We continue to give advice and assistance to people who are in trouble because of their HIV status. For obvious reasons we cannot talk openly about these cases. Our advice continues to be for people in this situation to pretend to be compliant with doctor’s orders, while following messages from their mind, heart and body in private. Protecting yourself and your family is more important than overturning ‘AIDS Inc.’.

Support

At the request of Christine Maggiore we are hosting the website for MOMM (http://www.positivemomm.com). We hope that this will evolve into a group run by mothers (and fathers and other guardians) who are protesting their loss of control over the health of their HIV-positive children.

Volunteering

If you are concerned about the effects of the prevalent dogma that HIV causes AIDS, there are ways that you could help out. While financial donations are always welcome, we welcome your time even more. Some of the roles that you could perform are:

• Corresponding Secretary: Monitoring and following up on correspondence. Not surprisingly, we rarely get prompt responses to our (very polite) letters. Someone to follow up until a response is obtained would be very valuable. Even when a response is obtained, they are often evasive, and persistence is required to get any information. This job could also include providing copies of books at no cost, or at reduced cost, as well as our publications.
• Peer Support: Receiving emails from our website, and providing information or non-medical support.
• Public Relations Campaigns: Through advertising or demonstrations, we can raise the profile of this important issue.
• Arranging meetings: Arranging for meetings of HIV-positive people who want to question their current advice, or perhaps arranging for speakers, videos or other forms of information exchange.
• Website Manager: Ensuring that our website is accessible through all the major search engines and enhancing the experience of our visitors.
• Research: We could use assistance with the ongoing task of obtaining copies of important HIV/AIDS papers. This can involve correspondence with the authors or trips to the medical library.
• Others: There are many things that we are not doing. Write your own volunteer job description! We would be glad to have you on board.

© Copyright Wednesday, June 27, 2007: Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society

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