Last week President Bush promoted the most expensive of drugs paid with tax dollars though an inexpensive nutrient is documented by government documents and scientific research for AIDS. This con of drug promotion fused with use of public funds from the tax doles was noted last week as part of the annual address of the State of the Union speech to a joint session of Congress and to the nation.
President Bush noted that his own program for “drugs has grown from 50,000 to more than 800,000 in three short years” with a plea to “continue funding our efforts to fight HIV/Aids”.
Timing is everything?
Supplementation with the essential mineral selenium was noted to stop and reverse viral build-up in HIV-positive patients in a news report the day prior to the State of Con-Fusion speech.
The news report was about a clinical trial of United States researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published in the science journal Archives of Internal Medicine with a publication date the same date as the news report.
The amount of selenium used in the trial was 200 micrograms daily. This same 200 microgram daily amount was used in a previous cancer trial that demonstrated astounding results in cancer prevention. Supplementation with this same 200 micrograms daily amount has been recommended since the 1970s by Dr. Gerhard Schrauzer, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of medical chemistry.
Items specifically noted were the very low cost of selenium supplementation, the necessity of better forms of selenium that are of biological origin for superior access to the bloodstream, and that low blood selenium is linked to more opportunistic infections and higher viral virulence.
Some may answer that this information the day before the speech by President Bush was too new to be known about before last week’s State of Con-Fusion speech.
New news is old news
“Selenium deficiency is commonly associated with HIV/AIDS, and has been associated with a high risk of death from this disease,” noted a NIH report from 2002. That report considerably predates last week’s speech. It also predates the President’s program for spending tax dollars on very expensive AIDS drugs to 800,000 individuals.
Children with HIV observed for five years were noted to die at a younger age with low selenium levels by the same NIH report that relates the importance of selenium “because of its role in the immune system”.
“Selenium deficiency is associated with decreased immune cell counts, increased disease progression, and high risk of death in the HIV/AIDS population,” added 2003 and 2004 updates to the above NIH report.
Those NIH federal government updates also noted “selenium status” as “a significant predictor of survival for those infected with HIV”.
These statements in the NIH documents were backed up with citations from science journal articles dating back to 1997.
Neither a poorly functioning immune system nor any disease is indicative of a “drug deficiency”. The proper course of action for health is nutrition that is both much less costly and much more effective.
Do you suppose that the deep and long association of the Bush family to pharmaceuticals such as serving on the Board of Directors at WElie Lilly (more commonly known as Eli Lilly) could cloud the vision of the President?
