THE outbreak and spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa in 2014/2015 and, more recently, the rapid spread of the Zika virus in Brazil towards the end of 2015 as well as the beginning of 2016 is something amounting to a wake-up call to all of us.
The Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea was accompanied by explanations revolving around how the virus had suddenly crossed from the animal world, here represented by monkeys and chimpanzees and settled comfortably in the human body as its new vector, wreaking frightful havoc in the process.
Much was also said about the dangers of eating bush meat which, surprisingly, Africans had always enjoyed for centuries without being visited by the dreaded virus which killed nearly 11 000 people.
The fact that after losing so many people over many months we still don’t know the reason for the outbreak of this dreaded virus should be a cause for worry.
One probable cause which was debated but quietly abandoned was the fact that some biological/medical experiments involving trials of drugs were going on in Sierra Leone just before the outbreak of the pandemic.
According to some reports, these trials were being carried out by specialists who hailed from some of the topmost laboratories in the US, well-known to be involved in biological warfare experiments. No one has confirmed these reports neither has anyone denied them.
It is interesting to note that HIV/AIDS, according to Western research, is supposed to have originated in Africa in 1981, notwithstanding the fact that the first cases to receive medical treatment were some gays from San Francisco community in US in 1978/9.
Also of interest to note is that the Ebola virus, like that of the AIDS virus, can be spread through sexual intercourse with an infected person. Now the same sexual dimension, apart from the impact of mosquito bites themselves, is also said to apply to the Zika virus which is alleged to be causing a high rate of birth defects to babies of infected mothers in Brazil.
In one way or other, sex becomes a common thread in all three dreaded diseases mentioned above. In other words all the three have the potential to inflict unprecedented havoc on the health and growth, or lack of it, of our respective populations.
In the Brazilian case, it is also on record that some experts who carried several experiments on mosquitoes released large batches of these genetically modified insects several times in Brazil in 2012. This fact has not been disputed by anyone so far.
In a way therefore, the Zika virus could be the direct outcome of an experiment which went horribly wrong.
As far as Africa is concerned, we cannot afford to be mere bystanders in situations where our health is at stake.
We need to know as a matter of urgency whether the stories we hear about drug trials and other experiments being carried out on our people by Western experts are true or false. Most of us would like to believe that these stories are not true but is that the real situation on the ground?
Below is a brief outline of some of the drug trials which were done on our continent and which are not in dispute.
According to one, Harriet Washington, who authored a book titled Medical Apartheid (2006), Zimbabwe was used as an experimental laboratory for the use of a population control drug Depo-Provera. This American drug was tested on black women during the 1970s, especially those women who resided on white-run commercial farms.
Because most of these women were barely literate and poor, it is unlikely they knew that they were being experimented upon.
Most of them were vulnerable and easy to coerce into accepting Depo-Provera because their lives depended on their white employers who were, as it turned out, quite keen to curtail the rapid population growth of blacks in general.
It is therefore not surprising that as soon as Zimbabwe attained its independence in 1980, it banned Depo-Provera in 1981 because one of its side-effects was heavy, continuous bleeding.
In another drug trial case, again involving Zimbabwe,
17 000 HIV positive women were put on AZT drug trials in 1994 under the auspices of the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the University of Zimbabwe. The idea was to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS.
Half of these women received a placebo, in the process exposing about 1 000 babies who subsequently contracted HIV/AIDS. The AZT drug testing only ended in Zimbabwe in 1998 when the CDC announced it had acquired enough medical information from trials it had conducted in Thailand. It is important to note that this AZT drug was not tested in the US itself first.
One case related to drug trials, again in Zimbabwe, is that which involved a Scottish-born doctor, Richard McGowan. Apparently the doctor was involved in a covert operation in which he deliberately used overdoses of anaesthetics on patients who invariably turned out to be black. This unauthorised and unorthodox medical practice went on for a long time and involved over 500 patients until authorities linked him directly to the death of five black patients! He was tried and convicted on two of those deaths and was sentenced to a one-year jail-term by the then white dominated judiciary system.
In another case which involved Doctor Michael Swango, patients died mysteriously in Zambia and the DRC. Medical authorities in these two countries discovered that once he left each of these two countries, patients stopped dying under mysterious circumstances.
In all, he killed 16 patients using unusually high doses of chemotherapy for cancer treatment. And he would subsequently write to various medical journals making fraudulent claims that he had pioneered a new and effective way of treating cancer.