russian security services say they know who is responsible but are not confirming media speculation but local militia and sultan delayed. kosovo's ex prime minister faces a retrial at the hague and torture charges against the yugoslav crimes tribunal abandons their original trial a motion to night to get ago due to lack of evidence but has now ruled that witnesses were intimidated. on the cost of suffering human rights activists at an aids conference in ghana accuse pharmaceutical companies of keeping the price of drugs to come to the disease sky-high scientists hala but say they're getting closer to a breakthrough cure in the botched the games the condition would have killed over twenty five minutes so all. those are the headlines crosstalk is coming up next and today the battle against aids is under debate.

oh and welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle the aids biz fighting a deadly virus with the endless funding of big pharma how much consensus is there within the scientific community how much dissent is confronting the aids epidemic need a complete rethink. education. to discuss the world's largest medical problem i'm joined by denis broome in vienna

he's the united nations aids regional director for europe and central asia in mine ham we have peter duesberg a professor of molecular and cell biology at the university of california berkeley and in new haven we go to steve katter he's the president of global pharma insights and another member of our crosstalk team on the hunger all right gentlemen crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want then he said i to go to you first in vienna you're at the can this international aids conference it's the eighteenth fund raising is an issue i seriously doubt awareness has to be an issue at least in the modernized industrialized world but everyone knows about this epidemic so what do you hope to achieve at this conference is it looks like the at this point it's the conference of low expectations because of the recession well i wouldn't say that completely at first there is a level of awareness which is very low in some parts of the region in eastern europe and central asia we find that among young people sometimes more than half do

not know how each of these transmitted do not know how to prevent it how to protect themselves we also have all the types of expectations that this conference has to share some of the new things on science you know today that was announced that the clinical. miles of new show including to no four year was protective for women to a pretty large extent so there are new things coming up we know also keeping more than five million people on treatment is going to be a challenge because new money is not coming out ok if we go to a man or professor duesberg what do you think about this process going on in vienna it's the eighteenth conference on an aids also the issue of raising billions and billions of dollars to fight this epidemic what do you think about what's going on in vienna right now i do think it's a problem but the problem is actually much much less so then it's commonly advertised the reason is that aids when it it's why it was when it was first

discovered in nineteen eighty-four it was thought to be a new password bio's that would cause a general epidemic decimating people in the united states first where it was first presumably discovered and then in the rest of the world it would be in a fatal every day make like the flu the spanish flu in one thousand eight hundred where millions died all the polio every day makes in the fifty's and sixty's where cells and since thousands died in the western world but and the vaccine was promised quite a way to be away a little two years later but what happens now in the last twenty six years is much much better than predicted. it was in fact days know it be that me and people don't want to admit to this after they predicted so many times it would happen days now and there's no every day in the western world hardly anybody ever got aids only

scopes made almost. talk uses there was no i mean to me give you a. known and sells america mention still there may be something coming in awfully but even that seems to be flawed so we have to we have actually some good news here we have no channel epidemic there is no must is in the western world for sure and unfortunately while we don't have a vaccine but we don't need a vaccine if we don't have a virus that would cause a passage any florida or an epidemic ok if i go to new haven here steve the professor paints this is not being such a big. catastrophe as we've hear all the time in media a lot of people actually call this the aids industry. norma's amounts of money put into advocacy awareness in and i would agree with you in russia central asia eastern europe awareness needs to be heightened but still it's same time in the

industrialized west is a professor point out a lot of people do know about it i mean do you for big pharma as it's called i mean this is an important industry for them fighting this virus isn't it well you know aids is part of the portfolio of any drug company that's manufacturing drugs it's usually a very small part there are companies like which is definitely the leader these days where drugs are the majority of what they do but if you look at any other drug manufacturer hiv is actually a very small piece of their business. so i think that you know the instructor companies look at this as. definitely an opportunity for profit you know this is a capitalist society they have to make money they have to cover their r. and d. expenses they have to be able to produce new hiv drugs and they do that by making money on the drugs that they have already produced but they also look at it as

a social issue and i think that with the exception of one or two companies which i personally choose not to work with anymore the drug companies have done a very nice job of trying to understand this market get out there identify challenges where they can make a difference and you know direct funding so that they can be helpful i think that you know these are huge problems they are not problems that any one drug companies budget can cover but in the in the clients that i work with and my job just so everyone knows is is basically to represent the voice of people with hiv as well as health care providers whether those are doctors p a's nurses to the drug company so that the drug company knows first hand what the what the needs are what the opinions are how they can introduce better versions of the drugs they've already got create new drugs that are easier to get is limited. but i mean that big

pharma is how you really had a bad rap over the last few years maybe the last two or three years that it's gotten its act together at least a public relations point of view because a lot of people are saying just making huge amounts of money off of it and i go back to big pharma little bit later but i did go to denise here at the united nations and other act and advocates that you have come across in vienna are they satisfied with the participation and the work that the big pharma is done in dealing with this virus because like i said over the last several maybe the last two years it was the big pharma had a very black name when it came to dealing with this virus. what is difficult to say that i mean you have all of the inventions. hiv have been developed by big pharma they have come up from horse out of different laboratories public private but big pharma has been developing them getting them to patients and these drugs when they fell out of patent have been taken by generic manufacturers who are very important

suppliers for the treatment of people around the world so there is kind of a partnership it may not be always open and brotherly partnership but it's there between the community fighting hiv and the pharmaceutical industry ok and thank god that they are doing these drugs ok if i go to the professor in mannheim. professor do you think that. what is your opinion of big pharma in dealing with this fighting this virus i mean a lot of critics and a lot of people who would be critical of you also. and say that this is just a huge money bag i mean for the pharmaceutical business is with the three hundred fifty billion dollars business a year it's growing ten percent i mean in an environment like this it's doing pretty well i mean what do you think of their role in fighting aids. i mean from the point of view of aids research each science is a big disaster because the talks are all aimed at inhibiting these so-called aids

woes which just knew it doesn't do anything it is not passive jenny there are forty million people on this planet according to the w.h.o. have feature we most them don't even know about it they're completely healthy a third of these up to the africa hope you lation is estimated to be positive the african population has doubled i am saying forbes four hundred to eight hundred millions in the last twenty five years since they are infected by this virus. in it in over twenty five percent whatever you want but w.h.o. has over and over the advertise they are all infected and all going to died reality is they have doubled and they cared about was that doesn't do any harm and in in in the companies tied to the vials that doesn't do anything with drugs that are in ever terribly toxic ok that's where developed the easy t. was developed forty years ago all for one purpose to cause to kill human cells for

cancer chemotherapy and the result is they have never ever cured one aids patient they even say that ok did i do you disagree do you disagree with that. of course i mean we have two million people die of hiv infection every year and these are not people who die of old age i can tell you that the average age of people who die in russia is thirty two years this is pretty ostracism. until viruses are keeping people alive and people are staying alive thanks to administration of these products and we have now five billion people on the retrovirus and response to that that mortality has decreased so much that people live a normal life. professor would you like to reply that i generally disagrees with you on that strongly disagrees with you on. it is a result providing any evidence the only people said forty million thirty forty million are not treated the day doing well it's the people who are getting these trucks that are inevitably toxic they are designed to try and we need d.n.a.

synthesis that's the central molecule of life you're dying from that that is aids by prescription and five hundred thousand people are prescribed these talks alone in the u.s. all of them now die about half of them die from diseases that have nothing to do with hiv we'd have never been a trip through it before the break you know to go to cities like houston professor assures me when i do go to steve you haven hear other professors sensually saying that the companies that you represent are killing their patients. it's. really just listen to what steve has to say here go ahead. i would say that professor dues birds opinions. on the good side are disrespectful and on the worst side are tantamount to murder i just want to say that when three drug therapy was introduced in one thousand nine hundred six. we were able to see a decrease in aids related deaths after four years of eighty four percent so that's

doing exactly the opposite of what he's saying the drugs were not killing people they actually have made an enormous impact on saving people's lives since one thousand nine hundred sixty below. and we have to jump in here gentlemen after a short break we'll continue our discussion on aids stay with r.t. . and. most.

ah. engine sailors call it the sea canary due to its high pitched twists. this man this highly communicative. what's it's like to sleep and can be decoded something which . just. secrets good.

welcome back to crosstalk i'm peter lavelle to remind you we're talking about the business around each ideations.

but before let's see what russians think about the government's efforts to deal with this problem convening under the slogan right here right now the eighteenth international aids conference gathers twenty thousand people from one hundred eighty five countries representing scientific civil society a condemned make and government community over thirty three million people live with a chevy this is according to the latest figures and about one million of them in russia the russian public opinion research center asked citizens if the russian government pays enough attention to the ha the aids problem opinion is divided forty four percent say government does enough to prevent the disease and to keep people informed about it forty three percent of the respondents say not enough effort is being made to tackle the problem peter ok i'd like to go back to steve in new haven you're making a point about in reacting to what the professor had to say is he saying that the

some of the drugs that are being developed are actually hurting their patients even killing them and you're defending the industry and in researching this program there is a debate though if it's if there's a very small minority in the professor is one of them that these drugs are very counterproductive and actually it's creating more and more drugs to just keep the process going it's good business i mean that's one of the criticisms. you know this brings me back to the mid eighty's when i was a consultant to burroughs welcome which was the company that introduced the first aids drug a.z.t. and we would go out to interview people and talk to them about sometimes their hesitancy is in taking the drug and we now know that a.z.t. is an incredibly toxic drug and most people try not to prescribe it when they don't need to. but we heard back then especially from african-americans that they thought that the drug had been created by the u.s. government in order to you know as

a type of genocide and you know you can understand where opinions like that came from when people are coming home taking this drug having all kinds of horrible reactions and people around them are seeing this and saying well i don't want any part of that but you know we're twenty five years from that we're not in the mid eighty's anymore and you know so while there may have been some suppositions that could've existed to support our producer various theories back then you know let's deal with what we know now the drug companies have made these drugs a lot less toxic they have gotten the formulations down to the point where now we're about to see for drugs introduced in a single pill once a day that's never been in existence before we have very exciting new findings such as dr brewer just mentioned with the it's an off of your gel which is cutting incidence of contracting hiv in half by people who use it correctly denise would you say maybe if we can say more broadly is there a why debate would be the discussion about how to deal with aids because there will

be people like professor the professor that we have in the program and damn people that support him saying that there is no debate allowed in this in this endeavor is how would you describe that is there a debate on how things should be done or is it just so close and narrow now that other voices can't be heard. points i mean any voice can be heard i think of people are free to express an opinion. we must be careful that people do not express opinions which are dangerous to patients so we have seen in russia some you know religious fundamentalists denying that there would be a hiv and it was god's punishment that had to be accepted by the patients we don't think it's a way of having a constructive relationship with people living with hiv and helping them in their fight against a disease i consider unfortunately professor dispense opinion the feeling of the same vein what is clear in this conference here in vienna we have more than twenty thousand people and i can tell you this

a very lively debates happening all the time with demonstrations and lot of opinions expressed but no one is saying anything like denying the role of hiv in creating or saying that the drugs are dangerous for people actually there's really a kind of a universal movement to make sure that people access treatment get what saves them professor bring about a man and what it will how do you react to that is there a lively debate lively discussion on how to deal with this virus because in preparing for this program you're not the most liked person when it comes to this baby all day one live day is the end days indeed one divided no discussion as you can hear from steve and dennis they are implying they're calling everything i'm saying do specs opinions but i'm relying on the toxicity of the anti-viral drugs on studies that have been published so-called controlled studies in new england

journal of medicine in the lancet these and more recently the concord study that has used a.z.t. the same talk that he did you know admits is a little less toxic than it used to be that was not by by africans that was reported by ellen cruel french study in the lancet the oldest medical journal that it would increase mortality twenty five percent compared to untreated people and that it. call it was not to be commended as a talk to prevent aids and that is how it is prescribed now that is not my opinion i am not a mass murderer for siding evidence that is published in the lancet and the in the new england journal of medicine and he also and added that it was denny's or was it steve i can't say now which of the two their discussion is softly and we have an opinion to what to why is why don't they recognize org knowledge that there was and turn to be of aids conference in vienna are just tools we days ago and that i was

one of the authors of a paper that question the talk to it meant specifically it was published in medical i potters is in england last year for two months and then it was censored it was taken off by a by anonymous based on anonymous charges leveled at our paper form aids these searches hiv aids researchers presented to the publish elsewhere they fired the editor they changed the journal they censored two papers that's announce the move if you ever seen one ok it's not free exchange. it's ok denise did you want to jump in there because i did go to steve go ahead denise yes i'd like to pitch in on a on a very short thing a.z.t. is indeed a dangerous drug we know it this is something which was used twenty five years ago when it was decided long ago to go into tree therapy no one in his right senses suggested to use it too long today it's as if people were suggesting to treat

syphilis with arsenic as was done in the beginning of century this is finished we now have cocktails we have groups of throats with which are virtual or it exists we cannot discuss today's situation on the basis of antique type of data which are no longer valid in any way ok steve if i go to you i mean maybe just more of your opinion and the people that you do with the industry. would prefer. had to say about his paper being censored taken down and all of that and then the problems he had it at berkeley having to be reviewed and all that i mean that sounds pretty severe i mean if you don't really like what the professor asked if they want to just ignore him but he seems to be constantly attacked and i'm not defending his position but maybe just he's right to be able to say what he wants that's why he's on the program. you know i think that anyone should be able to say what they want you know this is the united states and that's one of the greatest parts about this country and the problem is as i think that dr byrne just referred to is when you

have an extreme opinion that gets attention and it's based on completely obsolete data it can actually cause harm you know dr duesberg was on president mbeki advisory council and was one of the real voices that led him to you know really decide that hiv didn't cause aids and to pull the plug on a lot of programs that could have saved hundreds of thousands of people's lives that's dangerous so i think that all people should be able to say these things and be presented you know as part of data to be considered when someone in power who's already a little unbalanced gets a piece of information like that it can really have disastrous consequences so i'm worried about that and i just think that this really ought to go away we should be focusing on the future and you know how to improve things from here how to get these drugs into more people's hands especially in the developing world and stop

really chasing our tail about something that has no relevance anymore ok professor i mean there was an allegation laid against you are you a dangerous man. if if then isn't steve saying that science is dangerous speaking to to stay is speaking based on evidence and i have evidence for every one of these numbers that's why it was a sensitive paper if they had been able to answer it giving concrete answers why a.z.t. which is still in all anti-viral talks it's one element of the cocktail of three or four why a city which is designed to kill human cells it is a d.n.a. change herminator is all of a sudden fine that would be another matter there are no new publications they in their. american publications in the new england journal of medicine which say that this treatment half of all its patients in america now would die now days die from

diseases that have never been attributed to me they are all attributed to anti-viral drugs i'm talking about liver diseases heart diseases and kidney disease is that their dying form it's published in the new england journal of medicine only in sharma rice lays one of the references you can look it up yourself in two thousand and three in two thousand and six in two thousand and seven very recently not twenty or thirty years ago as you imply and also about the epidemic in south africa that i'm responsible for where you used kind words of mass murder that was part of the paper again that was censored we checked the statistics to search this stick saw that in the same year where the harvard study from essex claimed to we had murdered one point eight million the population copilots we million half a million every single year those are the published facts you can verify that the censorship is because we were not supposed to say that because it would undermine

the idea the propaganda that hiv is a deadly virus well we can see there are still many opinions on this subject many thanks my guest vienna. new haven in mind him and thanks to our viewers for watching us here at r.t. see you next time and remember cross talk rules. and.

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