Seriousness of A.I.D.S. overrated — claim
NZPA-Reuter Copenhagen A winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize for medicine said in an interview that the seriousness of A.I.D.S. was overrated if compared with other diseases that kill millions in the Third World. Immunologist Niels Jerne, aged 74, told the Danish railway journal, “Ud og Se”: “We have lived with diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness in Africa, which several million people die frpm every year. these diseases
no longer occur in Europe or North America, the effort made to get them under control is not very great. “I predict that a method of curing and preventing the spread of A.I.D.S. will be found in the next five years. “I cannot see it is the frightful threat it is made out to be but it is interesting to write about in the newspapers because it can be linked with homosexuality. “The number of people who have actually died of
A.I.D.S. is tiny — less than those who die in road accidents. People say that in 10 years it will be 100,000, then a million, but I do not believe it will go that way.
“This A.1.D.5.-mania is exaggerated,” said Britishborn Jerne, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the body’s defence system.
It is this system that is broken down by A.I.D.S. which can be transmitted by transfusions and sexual contact.
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Press, 5 December 1986, Page 32
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228Seriousness of A.I.D.S. overrated — claim Press, 5 December 1986, Page 32
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