Hold The Phone: LaRouche May Have Been Partially Right

The AIDS-Malaria Connection

In the early 1980s Lyndon LaRouche, a self-centered ego-maniacal lunatic manipulator of the political process who ended up in jail, made some arguments that HIV and AIDS was spread by mosquitos. As I hurried through the Pittsburgh airport one day there was a bunch of "LaRouchies" handing out literature touting LaRouche's political thoughts (as loose, tangential and bizarre as they may have been), including the idea that mosquitos were at least one way that HIV or AIDs could be transmitted. A lot of people laughed the idea off because the odds of the HIV virus living in the intestinal tract of a cold-blooded insect for any length of time seemed unlikely. There was one study that I read that indicated that the spread of HIV by mosquito vector was possible if--and only if--perfect conditions were present, but those perfect conditions yielded odds like 1 in 600,000,000 in terms of possible transmission.

However, the current research indicates that other mosquito-borne illnesses (malaria in particular) can increase the effects of HIV and AIDS-affected immune systems as well as increase the virulence, contagious qualities and susceptibility to HIV, malaria and other illnesses.

While this study focused on malaria and HIV/AIDS, I am willing to venture forth an opinion that such is the case for yellow fever, dengue fever, West Nile fever and other mosquito-borne illnesses. It is a supposition, but it is based upon reasoning that a depressed immune system is increasingly at risk for infection. I am willing to bet that other vector-borne diseases would demonstrate similar dynamics, including the various hemorrhagic fevers, rickettsial fevers (i.e. Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted fever), etc.

So, if a person is infected with HIV, it makes sense to take additional precautions to prevent contact with insects, rodents and other vectors involved in the transmission of diseases. However, the question that this article raises for me is whether or not the world is willing to tackle the issues identified by supplying impregnated mosquito netting, cotrimoxazole and education of health care and public health workers in adequate qunatities to genuinely tackle the problems.

In a paper published in the journal Science, researchers looked at health records from Kisumu, Kenya, a city of 200,000 with high levels of both diseases. They calculated that the interaction of the diseases increased AIDS cases by 8 percent and malaria by 13 percent. Over 25 years, that meant 8,500 additional AIDS cases and almost a million extra cases of malaria. The researchers drew on earlier findings that H.I.V.-positive people who get malaria experience a six- to eight-week spike in the level of the AIDS virus in their blood. During that spike, they are supercontagious, with double the usual chance of infecting a sexual partner. People with H.I.V. have also been proved more likely to catch malaria.

One important lesson of the study is that protecting H.I.V.-positive people from malaria would also limit the spread of AIDS. They need insecticide-treated bed nets to sleep under, and should take a daily dose of the antibiotic cotrimoxazole. Combining bed nets and cotrimoxazole with antiretroviral therapy reduced malaria cases in H.I.V.-positive people by 95 percent in one study. Cotrimoxazole is cheap, but is not yet widely used in poor countries.

The findings should add extra urgency to the fight against malaria, which has always lagged far behind AIDS in both money and attention. Last week President Bush convened a forum on malaria, but the fact that more than a million people — most of them under 5 — die each year from a disease that is easily preventable and curable speaks volumes.

The study also sheds new light on why Africa’s AIDS rates are so much higher than elsewhere: Africans’ health is poor, and they are more likely to suffer from diseases — malaria, genital herpes and others — that make H.I.V. more transmissible.