This conference set out to heighten participants’ awareness of the methodological debates surrounding the biomedical construction of ‘HIV/AIDS’. The participants included many individuals medically diagnosed with ‘HIV antibodies’ as well as people rejecting ‘HIV antibody’ testing and members of the nursing, medical and other health related professions. Participating groups were represented from all over Europe including Austria, Germany, Holland, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Switzerland, the many regions of Spain, as well as from further afield, like Brazil. In addition to the Barcelona based hosting organization, COBRA, several other Spanish anti AIDS organizations were significant in their presence (Table 1). A hallmark of the international AIDS conference scene (like the upcoming AIDS Congress in Geneva) is multinational corporate patronage. This was not forthcoming for this particular conference, as its organizing participants (Table 1) have successfully, over the last ten years and more, contested the commercial vested interests and the so called scientific basis behind the proposed retroviral causation of AIDS. This placed the Barcelona conference both morally and ethically above the usual ‘junket’ style of AIDS conference, which are typically awash with funding from the AIDS pharmaceutical industry.

The core of the Barcelona conference consisted of a focused scientific course for its international participants. In many ways, this was the ‘doppleganger’ of the AIDS orthodoxy: a course to deconstruct the ‘AIDS/HIV orthodoxy’, and so critically different from the introductory ‘starter AIDS/HIV courses’ which those ‘HIV antibody’ diagnosed are offered by the gamut of drug company sponsored ‘self help’ groups in Britain. The course aimed to deconstruct the existence of ‘HIV’ and the validity of antibody testing. It also aimed to describe how the official or ‘orthodox’ medical treatments for AIDS are toxic and to further describe the range of efficient and non aggressive therapies available for helping people experiencing a variety of illnesses.

Well dispersed within the daily sessions were personal presentations in the form of testimonies from both women and men medically diagnosed as having ‘HIV antibodies’. These individuals were ‘diagnosed’ over 13 years previously. Most were medically advised at that time to begin prescribed courses of antiretroviral therapy, AZT, and more recently AZT in combination with a variety of protease and other ‘anti HIV’ drugs, as well as prophylactic antibiotic therapy, like Septrin. What no participant, nor especially any self respecting ‘health professional’, could afford to ignore in this two week long conference were the frightening details embodied in such testimonies.

In every case, these personal testimonies from individual participants told of an overwhelming rejection of the ‘label of HIV antibody positive’ as part of their rejection of the orthodox biomedical construction of AIDS and all that entails. These individuals had intuitively understood at the time of their ‘HIV antibody positive diagnosis’ that the orthodox medical construction of the ‘HIV/AIDS hypothesis’ was erroneous, rejecting the notion of infection with a ‘retrovirus’. Many reported that if they had accepted the label of ‘HIV antibody positive’ they would have embarked upon a (short) life time of testing/screening, abortions and toxic experimental drug treatments. They had understood that this overly 'medicalized' future was being offered to them and their loved ones by the medical establishment, and on this basis they all had, individually, rejected it. In retrospect, given the prospective good health of every one of these individuals and their partners and children, all had experienced the ‘AIDS/HIV’ industry as a reality of ‘entrapment’ and coercion, led by AIDS health and social care ‘professionals’. This was experienced as starting with ‘HIV antibody testing’ and then potentially progressing to a lifelong 'patient' occupation of regular clinic based screening, testing and the taking of prescription experimental drugs, for both themselves and perhaps all of their loved ones.

These empowering testimonies acted as a counterpoint to the narrative of deconstruction of the so called ‘basic science’ of ‘AIDS/HIV’, the major theme of this conference. Such individual testimonies of empowerment aptly demonstrated how personal strength can overcome the almost overwhelmingly powerful and all pervasive imperative to test/screen, medicate and thus label ‘HIV antibody positive’. For many of these quite ordinary Spanish men and women (and on behalf of their children), to decide against this powerful orthodoxy must have been a profound act of self determination in the face of what the whole world appears to believe is ‘fact’. All the women decided against such ‘advice’ and went to full term with uneventful deliveries and now thirteen years later have healthy adolescent children. The advice had been given solely on the basis of a positive ELISA or Western blot ‘HIV antibody test’, even though the women reported being in extremely good health during the mid late 1980s when ‘HIV antibody tested’ . Several of these women reflected upon such ‘testing ordeals’, often experienced at the hands of overly zealous male and female obstetricians, who seemed from their testimonies as less motivated by ethical and moral practice than by their desire to boost the local hospital’s ‘HIV antibody cohorts’, receive extra monies from the Spanish government for ‘AIDS’ cases and more likelihood of being published by the medical press. One woman recalled how such an erstwhile male obstetrician gleefully conceded herself as his ‘first HIV positive pregnancy’, whom he wanted to publish as a ‘case study’, before strongly advising her to have an abortion due to ‘HIV infection’. This woman did not take his ‘advice’ and now her son is a fit and healthy 13 year old attending school. Within the testimonies of the many gay and straight men, a similar resolve and empowerment was very evident: a rejection of the biomedical certainty of ‘HIV infection’ premised on positive ELISA and Western blot ‘HIV antibody tests’. They reported a by now familiar and disconcerting interaction with health professionals in the ‘AIDS/HIV’ testing and treatment services, an interaction infused with prejudice against gay men and drug users and premised on socially constructed notions of being ‘at risk’ and ‘viral’ contagion.

TABLE 2: Conference Programme

Yet, if this were a ‘traditional’ ‘self help’ grouping, for example, like those for people diagnosed with diabetes, there would not typically be calls for the deconstruction of the biomedical ‘problem’ which had mobilized its foundation. ‘Traditional’ self help groups can have a too narrow focus on "..those who share the problem for which the group was founded, having no awareness of belonging to a broader category of self help groups"2 . As the dissident Barcelona AIDS conference (and COBRA, Continuum, IFAS and others) did not reflect such limitations, it went beyond self help, even though mutual aid (‘self help’) is well fostered through such activity as people are linked together and become more informed about various critiques of what is, after all, a very contested and "impure" science 3 . The Barcelona conference together with Continuum, IFAS and many others, are defining a broader category of a social movement4 , that is, a social movement against the ‘HIV/AIDS hypothesis’. Health professionals have been encouraged to take a stand in support of such social movements, and "bear witness" and "tell the truth"5 . Like those in Barcelona, recounting personal testimonies of ‘taking a stand’ - ‘telling the truth’ from one’s own experience and ‘non expert’ knowledge of antibody testing and antiretroviral drugs - one trusts that ‘health professionals’ involved in ‘AIDS/HIV’ will take a stand and do it soon.

2. Borkman, T. (1990) Self-Help Groups At The Turning Point. Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, Vol. 18, p. 321-332.

3. Epstein, S. (1996) Impure Science. AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

4. Back, K.W. and Taylor, R.C. (1976) Self-help groups: tool or symbol. Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, Vol. 12, p. 295-309.

5. Price, R.H. (1989) Bearing witness. American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 17, p.151-167.

COBRA’s new address is : CARTEGENA 230, 08013 Barcelona, Spain. Tel + 34 93 450 1300 Fax 456 4825