In a shameless bid to become the Wal*Mart/ Tesco of UK HIV service providers, THT now provides to over 50,000 HIVers of all sexualities a year.

It has achieved this "feat" by creating a virtual monopoly, swallowing up more than 20 smaller HIV charities across the UK since 1999 like ruthless private equity asset-strippers, "streamlining" each acquisition with extreme costcutting procedures that trim vital services to the bone or simply axes them altogether. A monopolistic precedent that THT's seemingly immortal chief suit, Nick Partridge, nevertheless regards as "an exciting opportunity to make a real impact for the UK as a whole". An exciting opportunity for who, exactly, as THT predatorily hovers over the longest-established and respected AIDS charity, Crusaid?

"How did [THT] consult with service users, the very people for whose benefit we exist? Were the views of the stakeholders and funders taken into account? THT...plans for a pale shadow of existing structures."
~ Roy Kilpatrick [Chair of HIV Scotland on THT's latest merger]

"There are so many people in need and so little in the way of services all over the UK. I've been horrified by all this, and am getting sick and tired of what I believe is jobs for the boys and dishonesty within the HIV sector. Where is the money going? I know I'm going to piss some people off, but Positive Nation is going to start exposing organisations who are taking advantage of HIV people and those who do not do what they are being paid to do with our taxes and charitable donations."
~ Ian Thomas [Publisher, Positive Nation]

THT has also drastically cut back vital counseling services to HIVers citing lack of funds. In May 2006 - the month it moved into lavish new multi-million pound premises in central London - the charity quietly announced the closure of its Specialist Advice Centre, which provided vital, high-level legal casework for dozens of HIV+ individuals, absurdly citing "budgetary restraints" and "increasing financial pressures". The centre’s team of solicitors, who often gave their time voluntarily and free of charge, stood up for the rights of HIVers who might otherwise have been unable to access legal representation over many years, winning numerous cases for those undergoing problems like immigration, housing, welfare benefits and social care.

"If the trend for mainstreaming our HIV services continues, I imagine we'll find ourselves in care settings which have all manner of impressive sounding equality policies displayed on the wall but fail to deliver in concrete ways that actually allow us the freedom to be who we are without fear of reprisal."
~ Russell Fleet [Positive Nation]

By June 2006, there were 36,920 gay and bisexual men living with HIV in the UK. THT's service user targets are obligingly made up by vast numbers of African immigrants and asylum seekers who make up nearly all of the UK's heterosexual HIV+ population, who are referred to the charity by the NHS and often prioritised.

"Half of the UK AIDS spend is on African asylum seekers and refugees... UK AIDS agencies...know that the cash cow in the AIDS industry is African and not indigenous gay men. It is high time we had a robust public debate about how our AIDS funds are spent and distributed, before indigenous HIV+ gay men lose even the few crumbs they currently are able to have."
~ Thomas Frank [Pink Paper]

THT's morphing from a gay men's HIV prevention charity into a bureacratised, market-driven HIV services provider, its complacency around HIV prevention and failure to educate effectively about correlated and causative health risks, such that crystal meth represents, is at complete odds with its long-stated prime objective spelled out, until recently, in its Mission Statement:

"To reduce the spread of HIV and STIs and promote good sexual health."

Since this article was posted, that wording has been mysteriously changed to read "To encourage people to value their sexual health, thereby minimising the spread of HIV and sexually transmitted infections, and reducing unintended pregnancies," effectively altering THT's mandate from preventers of the spread of HIV to mere encouragers of risk minimisation while implicitly emphasising that while it was set up as a charity for gay men it now serves all HIVers irrespectively, thereby boosting further demand for its government-funded services. In this context, it is easy to surmise how AID$ Inc. have created a problem - their failure to prevent soaring rates of HIV infection - in order to facilitate a self-serving solution while also significantly boosting the profits of Big Pharma.

"The AIDS charities nowadays seem more concerned with marketing their own services for HIV+ men and there aren't any campaigns dealing with the rise in barebacking, safer sex promotion or meth use to protect negative men."
~ David [Manchester scene-goer]

"No Condoms. No sex. Period. This simple mantra will stop HIV in its tracks, despite the best attempts of certain HIV and gay men’s health advisors to overcomplicate this for their own ends or oppose this in order to ensure future service-users."
~ Cass Mann [Positively Healthy]

The AIDS drug industry is now worth $7.1 billion
a year, and is set to grow by at least 5% a year for the next 10 years to be worth $10.6bn by 2015. Industry market researcher Datamonitor says those "best poised to reap dividends" will have invested in researching and developing drugs with new modes of action...

"While the advertisements promise health, the very market place of this investment industry is the existence and expansion of diseases. Prevention, root cause treatment and eradication of diseases threaten the pharmaceutical 'investment business with disease' and are therefore fought... The very industry that claims the monopoly on global health care is itself the biggest obstacle for the people of the world to enjoy a healthy life.... Accordingly, 80% of the pharmaceutical drugs currently on the market have no proven efficacy but merely cover symptoms. [Therefore] today’s most common diseases - including cardiovascular disease, cancer [and] AIDS - are not contained but continue to spread, despite the fact that effective, non-patentable alternatives [i.e. from nature] are available."
~ Dr. Matthias Rath, M.D.

Figures from the Centre for Responsive Politics, Campaign Finance Institute and Centre for Public Integrity reveal that $158 million was spent by drug companies to lobby the US federal government alone in 2004, $17 million was given in campaign donations (67% to Republicans), and $7.3 million was spent on political party conventions (64% going to the Republicans). $1m was given to the presidential campagn of George Bush and $1.5m to John Kerry. Big Parma has around 1,300 lobbyists in Washington - more than two for every member of Congress...

"You can hardly swing a cat in that town without hitting a pharmaceutical lobbyist."
~ Chuck Grassley [Senate Finance Committee Chairman]

It is a grim, if sobering, fact that Big Pharma makes infinitely more money drugging the infected and treating the symptoms of certain diseases than it ever would curing said diseases. It is an equally sobering fact that, 25+ years into an epidemic that should long before now have been contained and curtailed, three times as many UK MSM are seroconverting than in 1996 - the year HIV medications started being prescribed. Yet this appalling tally is the same worldwide wherever bureaucratised (i.e. corruptible) HIV agencies have allowed themselves to become mere public relations conduits that place the interests of outside bodies like Big Pharma and central government above those of the communities they profess to serve.

"The main beneficiaries of this quarter century-long AIDS catastrophe have been pharmaceutical companies which, despite the odd gesture, continue to manoeuvre to protect patents and profits at the expense of the poor."
~ Peter Gill [Body Count: How they turned AIDS into a Catastrophe]

Big Pharma reaps enormous dividends from AID$ Inc.'s zealous emphasis on, and promotion of, the drugs on which HIVers become dependent for life - costing $618,900 per newly-diagnosed 21-year-old HIV patient over an estimated average 24.2 year lifetime on meds- and its targeting the effects of unsafe sex with unproven pharmaceutical drugs like PEP while paying lip service to educating effectively about the causes; a collusion that drains the public purse and comes at a huge price to society.

"The idea that HIV bureaucrats and modern medicine promoters are living in a different reality is not far from the truth. In my view, HIV sector decision makers have no connection with reality. They're simply operating on a system of false beliefs and circular reasoning that justifies their efforts to protect Big Pharma profits by exploiting, misleading and directly harming the public."
~ Paul Clifton [UK.Gay.Com boards]

"The medications available are hailed as the answer to everyone's prayers where HIV is concerned, until you realise that their funding comes from cash-starved NHS trusts [in the UK], desperate to balance the books somehow while, in London, faceless suits are deciding which drugs can be used to treat HIV based solely on the cost of the treatment."
~ Plus-v-e Magazine

"Most [HIVers in the UK] are experiencing increased levels of deprivation... There's a loss to the economy of this group's productivity. There's an anecdotal figure for the cost of providing treatment to the NHS, which I've been advised not to reproduce here. Suffice to say, it's huge. Reducing the number of people living with HIV in the long-term will reduce the bill of HIV treatment, lost man-hours to the economy and reduce social welfare benefits being claimed by this group. This isn't rocket science."
~ Robin Brady [Chief Executive, Crusaid]

"The drug companies, the AIDS scientists, the World Health Organisation...all have gained [from HIV] except for HIV/AIDS patients and their loved ones, and the taxpayer. Some drug companies have become very rich with happy stock-holders. AIDS is a billion dollar business, and the big AIDS research money [in the US] is handed out exclusively by the Pentagon; another reason to suspect a tie of AIDS to military biological warfare research."
~ Alan Cantwell, MD [Aries Rising Press]

Therein lies the rub: because there's no financial incentive or sustainability in stemming the spread of HIV, the virus itself has become the market-driven HIV sector's lifeblood, with HIV- men these days eyed more as potential, lucrative service users; human fodder instead of human beings in need of effective, plain-speaking HIV prevention campaigns and initiatives around correlated and causative health risks.

"AIDS activist Michael Cottrell asked an extremely pertinent question of the Chairman of UK Coalition
concerning pharmaceutical company advertising in its publication Positive Nation: why did these companies not equally advertise and promote condom usage in the aggressive way they market their antiretrovirals?"
~ Cass Mann [Positively Healthy]

"My hope was one of the AIDS organisations would take the issue up and ask drug companies to assist us in stopping the spread of HIV. Instead they are hell bent on securing for the drug companies ever increasing profits. So certain is the trend in HIV infection in gay men with [AID$ Inc.] exercising absolute power over the AIDS and gay communities and gay press, one could easily write to the Financial Times and recommend pharmaceuticals as a sure fire share tip."
~ Michael Cottrell [UK.Gay.Com discussion board]

And just as there's no long-term profit or sustainability in curing society's ills as it dispenses life-prolonging treatments in the West - propelled by dishonest advertisements that portray users of HIV antiretrovirals as impossibly blemish-free superbeings - while steadfastly resisting calls for cheaper, generic versions to be made available to impoverished, under-developed nations (scandals that AID$ Inc.'s silence is complicit in aiding), HIV has become a golden egg for Big Pharma on a par with the diabetes and cancer industries.  

AIDS antiretrovirals are to Big Pharma what chemotherapy is to cancer; highly toxic treatments which sustain the patient in his/her condition while reaping enormous profits for their makers, who continue to transparently lament "no cure in sight". [See The Disease Industry]

"I have long thought that the medical establishment... feels it is best served by keeping people sick rather than healing them. Look at diabetes, as a cynic. What a wonderful disease! A diabetic will live a fully normal life, just spending thousands of dollars a year in doctor's visits and medications, eventually succumbing to the disease, but not until spending tens of thousands of dollars to combat the symptoms."
~ Steve Runyan [Kombucha answers]

"In an ideal world, health and research should be the responsibility of the states and not a private task of profit-oriented pharmaceutical industries... Many times I have seen a CEO or President of a pharma decide not to investigate a promising medication due to the long-
term lack of investment it may offer... We must be thankful to those pharmaceutical companies who understand that HIV patents are not pill-boxes, but human beings who deserve a normal life."
~ Filippo von Schloesser [HIV/AIDS specialist]