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Cuban Medicine Made AIDS Even More Deadly
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 15, 2015 @ 11:31 am In The Point | 11 Comments
The left has been holding up Cuban medicine as a model for everything. Including fighting AIDS, despite the fact that Cuba’s method for fighting the disease was to quarantine the patients. If the US had tried to do that, the same leftists praising Cuban medicine would have lost their minds. But it was okay because the quarantine camps had giant pictures of Che. So it was all progressive.
Cuba’s AIDS problem stemmed from its involvement in African wars and its own domestic sex trade. Or as one official put it,
“I pressed the health officials about the human burdens they were imposing,” Bayer said. “They replied, with a little bit of pride in Cuban machismo , that Cuban men could not be expected to control their sexual behavior.
That trade is one reason why so many lefties are so excited to visit Cuba. The dirty little secret of the left is that Cuba is its very own Thailand.
Havana’s conspicuous scenes of street-level prostitution are the public face of a hidden, sordid trade in children as young as four. Many prostituted children in Cuba are second- or third-generation, following in the footsteps of sex-worker mothers to earn money for families complicit in their exploitation.
For sex tourists, the island holds unique allure. It’s closer and cheaper than destinations such Thailand and Cambodia. HIV rates are dramatically lower than in most countries. And a trip to Cuba for single male tourists is free from the social stigma associated with Phuket or Phnom Penh.
Furtive negotiations with pimps, cabbies and staff at high-end Cuban hotels can easily procure meetings with young boys or girls, according to undercover conversations with Cuban insiders and hotel security staff last month.
The cost of forbidden youth is startlingly cheap: as little as $30 for the night.
Today, the influx of foreign money may well make prostitution among the most profitable jobs in a country where the average monthly salary officially stands at less than $20.
It’s hard to say what the real HIV rates are in Cuba. Communist countries tend to put out fake statistics about everything from literacy rates to poverty.
It now looks like Cuba’s AIDS problem was much worse than had been officially reported. Cuba supposedly had the lowest HIV rates in the Americas. It’s more likely that it had the highest rates because it now has a nasty new mutation.
A new HIV strain in some patients in Cuba appears to be much more aggressive and can develop into AIDS within three years of infection. Researchers said the progression happens so fast that treatment with antiretroviral drugs may come too late.
Without treatment, HIV infection usually takes 5 to 10 years to turn into AIDS, according to Anne-Mieke Vandamme, a medical professor at Belgium’s University of Leuvan. According to the study, published in the journal EBioMedicine, Vandamme was alerted to the new aggressive strain of HIV by Cuban health officials who wanted to find out what was happening.
“So this group of patients that progressed very fast, they were all recently infected,” Vandamme explained to Voice of America. “And we know that because they had been HIV negative tested one or a maximum two years before.”
None of the patients had received treatment for the virus, and all of the patients infected with the mutated strain of HIV developed AIDS within three years.
There are a few possibilities. Cuban testing may be really shoddy. That’s a likely assumption. Or alternatively, Cuba maintaining Sub-Saharan African conditions for some of its population, especially in the sex trade, may have given the disease a boost.
The logical thing to do would be to quarantine Cuba, but the left is going to spin this as showcasing how important it is that we cooperate with Cuba’s slave doctors in exporting this new flavor of the disease to America.
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