By Neville Hodgkinson
21 May 2006

(See original in The Business on line)  

IT WAS an icon of compassion, a sign you cared. To wear the red ribbon meant to express solidarity with HIV/Aids victims everywhere. It signified you knew the importance of antiviral drugs and HIV testing, Aids awareness and condoms – and of the urgent need for a vaccine.

Red ribbons Image Unesco: Young Digital Creators

In contrast, if you cast doubt on the ever-burgeoning and massaged HIV/Aids statistics; or suggested the billions raised for HIV research and treatment might be better spent on established medicines and in fighting poverty; or – perish the thought – if you questioned the theory that Aids is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, you lost your right to be considered a sensible and decent member of the human race. You were a “denialist”, a “pariah”, a “flat-earther”, a “crackpot”. Even if you were a leading scientist, your funds would disappear and your ability to publish in mainstream journals reduced to zero.

Today, whether it is frightening the residents of a Cornish town with a cluster of purported infections, or causing the former head of South Africa’s National Aids Council to apologise for having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive Aids activist, or enabling U2 front-man Bono to edit an issue of the Independent newspaper dominated by impassioned accounts of Africa’s HIV/Aids plight, the virus that has held such sway in the popular mind for more than 20 years is still never long out of the news. It is now very big business: American Express, Motorola, Gap, Converse and Armani are among the corporate giants supporting Bono’s RED campaign promoting special products to raise funds for Aids in Africa.

But unreported in Bono’s Independent (or in any other edition of the paper, which for years has followed an unquestioning line on Aids) there are signs that the power of the red ribbon is in serious decline. In the United States, where respectable opinion has long held the HIV theory of Aids to be immune to questioning, a controversial 15-page critique in the influential Harper’s Magazine has caused culture shock. As well as detailing a cover-up by government scientists regarding Aids medication trials, the article approvingly quotes scientists who have argued for years that HIV is not the cause of Aids.

Meanwhile the Washington Post last month published an investigation headlined “How Aids in Africa was overstated”, arguing that “increasingly dire” and inaccurate assessments of HIV infection by UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids) had “skewed years of policy judgments and decisions on where to spend precious healthcare dollars”.

In India, a proposed Red Ribbon Campaign through the national rail network has been abandoned, following a national convention on HIV in Bangalore last October attended by more than 1,500 HIV-positive people where the once-fashionable symbol of Aids awareness was ceremoniously rejected. In front of television cameras, a six-foot red ribbon was cut into pieces as a protest against the “oppressive and patronising” symbol.