HIV Denial Kills
Filed by: Guest Blogger
January 4, 2009 11:30 AM
http://www.bilerico.com/2009/01/hiv_denial_kills.phpEditors' Note: Justin B. Smith is a 28 year old Air Force veteran and gay and AIDS activist from Baltimore, MD. He writes Justin's HIV Journal.
HIV denialist Christine Maggiore, 52 died on the 27th of December. Maggorie was a Italian-American woman who founded the organization of Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives, a nonprofit group that questions whether or not HIV causes AIDS.
On national television and in a blistering book, she denounced research showing that HIV causes AIDS. She refused to take medications to treat her own virus. She gave birth to two children and breast-fed them, denying any risk to their health. And when her 3-year-old child, Eliza Jane, died of what the coroner determined to be AIDS-related pneumonia, she protested the findings and sued the county.
Alive and Well is centered around HIV-positive mothers, like Maggiore who don't want to take meds while pregnant. Maggiore was diagnosed as being HIV positive in 1992. Her organization promotes women, who are already HIV infected who plan to breast-feed their babies (a known route of HIV transmission). She also was the author of an HIV denialist book, What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?
