What is Digg?173 Comments
- Dakoman, on 10/12/2007, -22/+89shock horror, but there is no such thing as the AIDS virus. AIDS is caused by the HIV virus.
- fletchowns, on 10/12/2007, -2/+53I don't know but I'm never buying a Bayer product again.
- ElectricKetchup, on 10/12/2007, -23/+66@DakomanDakoman
HIV already has the word virus in it, so if you said "HIV virus", it would be redundant. Since AIDS is almost always caused by HIV, when people say "The AIDS Virus", they are talking about HIV. - valona, on 10/12/2007, -3/+43This is pure malignant evil. Greed is destroying this planet. We need people to stop buying products from companies such as Bayer and Nestle, Shell and so forth. We need a large media outlet that can highlight these issues, kick up hell, and give people back their fundamental rights as humans. People within these organisations are making decisions that will knowingly destroy and end lives. This is murder. You can fudge the issue and call it corporate neglect, and other fancy monikers, but at the end of the day, murder is what it is. All for money. Money that is never used to contribute to society, but just as a figure in an account. When corporations have greater power than governments then the place is in trouble. It seems people are either unwilling, or are unafraid to ask questions, to organise from the grassroots, to actively boycott. When Britney Spears pregnancy gets greater media attention than wretched stuff like this, then the vested interests have won, and the majority have succumbed to the brainwashing that is forced upon them.
- fletchowns, on 10/12/2007, -6/+44Bayer is German
- Cymrubeats, on 10/12/2007, -2/+34This story is from 2003, but that doesn't matter, i can't recall it being mentioned at all then.
- wilkeson, on 10/12/2007, -8/+37Who is your brother, Jessie MacBeth?
You're telling me, in a country crawling with journalists searching under every rock in the sun for the next Abu Ghraib, that soldiers were having competitions to see who could kill the most children? Please. Spare us the baseless lies and at least show a little more common sense. There is no way that platoons of soldiers were magically turned into serial killers. And on top of that it is impossible that no one, either within, or outside of their chain of command would notice and report this.
Yes there were the 15 marines that are being tried. I don't mean to ignore them, but they are far from the norm, and as soon as it was learned what they had done they were quickly arrested.
So please, stop spouting these lies about your "brother". And on a side note, what revolution happened forty years ago? The goverment we have in place has been there for over 200 years. - CiXeL, on 10/12/2007, -5/+29you want coverup? my grandmother's sister died of madcow in the united states in santa monica, california in the mid 1990s. they shipped her head to the CDC, came back with variant crutzfeld jacobs disease and yet was never counted in the statistics as a fatality from vcjd in this country. they claimed she got it on her frequent trips to europe but still its interesting it never got counted. wouldnt want to panic the public or anything right?
- asdfasdf, on 10/12/2007, -4/+27"The AIDS virus can't live outside a human body more than a few minutes. Not only that, but you can't get AIDS by swallowing it unless your mouth was a pulpy mass of bloody"
Exactly. You're assuming that the medication was a tablet. The drug was injectable. Meaning sold as little vials which were air tight (so HIV can survive, it's not 'outside' and exposed to air) and it gets injected into your bloodstream (meaning it doesn't get owned by your stomach's hydrochloric acid).
"Plus, you've probably had someone who's HIV prepare your food at least once in your life (which is harmless)."
What the hell? What's your point? Doesn't mean I want to go to the doctor for low blood pressure and come out infected with HIV.
"I don't understand this story at all."
You obviously did not see the link, which says the drug was injected. That fact alone would have probably saved you the retarted comment. - drunkenoaf, on 10/12/2007, -4/+26@Kwanbis. The American government allowed a German company to sell their products overseas?
*chortles* That's a bit of a stretch of the FDA's powers! - Egoist, on 10/12/2007, -16/+37Because if there's strife in the world, blame the US. If a child scrapes their knee walking out of their hut, it's because the US didn't pave their sidewalk. If the sky falls on your head, it's because the US didn't prop it up well enough.
Noam, is that you? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+23"There is no way that platoons of soldiers were magically turned into serial killers."
right, that could NEVER happen. soldiers could never be so desensitized that they wouldn't care about killing anyone. and it's never happened before. it especially never happened in nazi germany - gp120, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18Actually the events happened in 1984 before there was a test for HIV. Bayer were selling "factor VIII" purified from the pooled plasma from over 10,000 donors for the treatment of Hemophelia. There was growing evidence at the time that a new virus was being spread by blood products so Bayer should have known better but they could not have known for sure that there was any problem with the compound. Try googling for Bayer & HIV to get more of the story.
- RyeBrye, on 10/12/2007, -4/+22Didn't major pharm kill a bunch of babies in Africa with bad formula once in a similar situation?
- kmonihen, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18Are you thinking of Nestlé?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestle#Baby_milk_marketing - Aidenag, on 10/12/2007, -8/+24 for all the people having trouble remembering that far back to the early 80's or not alive for it.. These are the Hemo's that proved Aids wasnt just a ***** Virus.. they dropped by the thousands all over the world due to this.. there weaker bodies made them some of the very first clusters of causualties.
One study i read said these Hemo's were one of the largest reasons the virus spread so quickly, between there spouses, straight and gay sex partners, and more importantly the fact these people are hemo's with a now Deadly blood stream that would be in contact with health proffesionals, family members, or whomever.. And in the End direclty sped up the infection rate among the entire world..
More importantly.. These poor souls were the VERY first cases of the virus in many countries and regions of the world. In a sense creating Thousands of "Patient Zero's"
Mabe one day the people who always blame Homosexuals for the Aids virus will realize the virus would never have taken such a quick hold on the Gay, followed by Straight population if not for the Drug companies never ending disregard for medical and humaine ethics.
And for all you "im never buying Bayer again" a-holes.. Get a clue.... This is the company that created ZYCLON-B... Millions gassed and stil you purchased there asprin.. - asdfasdf, on 10/12/2007, -8/+22Most people here will shut up for $1000, and if not, they'll definitely smile with for a million dollars or two. Why would you give a ***** about kids in Iraq if it doesn't affect you or your family right? People need to wake up and get aware of things.
Do you guys really think anyone is going to do something to Bayer? We need to start doing things ourselves. We need a revolution.
GovTrack is a great site to keep track of congress and to learn about your representatives. This is exactly how Rome was right before its empire fell.
Please Digg GovTrack's site below. It's been mentioned on the New York Times and other places, but most people aren't aware of it.
http://www.digg.com/links/Track_the_US_congress_and_your_representatives - ddales, on 10/12/2007, -20/+32As a Former Marine and vet of Desert Storm 1, I refuse to believe that *****. I was at the front of the action for the first couple weeks and then spent a lot of time cleaning up in the rear afterwards. Your brother is spouting lies to try to impress people for some reason or another.
Even as a vet of the Somolia crap I never saw any US Forces do anything that was even questionably wrong. - CiXeL, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14you dont think the government wouldnt make you disappear if you even thought about organizing armed rebellion?
- rprouse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10@ddales You must have been lucky to go through two conflicts and not see any wrong doing. I was also in Somalia and saw or was told about in our daily briefings many injustices by ALL countries involved. The people involved were often tried and found guilty, but the punishment did not always fit the crime. For example, a US Sgt was convicted for murdering a Somali teenager for stealing his sunglasses. He was demoted and booked a months pay.
As for cover-ups, there is strong evidence of an attempted cover up of the murders in Haditha. CNN is now reporting "The U.S. military had previously refused to believe villagers who accused the Marines of murdering unarmed civilians, even when presented with credible evidence assembled by Time magazine for an article in March.
"They were incredibly hostile," said Time's Aparisim Ghosh. "They accused us of buying into enemy propaganda, and they stuck to their original story, which is that these people were all killed by the IED [improvised explosive device]."
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/05/29/marines.haditha/
I am not anti-military, I spent 10 years in, most of it in the Airborne, but countries and their militaries must obey international law and all war crimes must be properly investigated and tried. If we cannot take the moral high-ground, then what are we doing there. It just seems to me that the tide of public opinion against the Iraq conflict has caused the government and the military to do their best to try to keep stuff like this under wraps to prevent a further slide in public opinion. When you do that though and they are found out, it just makes matters worse. - ozydingo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Source: http://www.progressiveu.org/091304-bayer-accused-of-releasing-aids-and-hiv-tainted-drugs-in-foriegn-countries
"However, it was quickly discovered that the drug (which was made primarily of human blood products) was tainted with the AIDS virus." - mstar, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13Yeah, this never ever happened in Vietnam either...
or any war for that matter...
cos people just don't kill other people... I have the utmost respect for the Marines, but just because I do doesn't mean they're not human like the rest of us. And humans do bad things sometimes... - filovirus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Go rent the movie 'And The Band Played On' and you will see how the t-cells started to drop. The blood bankers were just as culpable in distributing contaminated blood products.
Raaaamone, greed-evil business executives should receive an HIV injection from Tippy Tom - wthnow, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12Dude PLease dont group the people putting their Ass on the line with the Idiots in charge. Thank you.
- Azzu, on 10/12/2007, -5/+14No matter old, digg digg digg ! This is simply outrageous
- aoeu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9The drug Bayer made was an injection drug, not your regular aspirin tablet.
And just for the sake of perfectionism, let's refer to it as HIV :) - Sukino, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=2006497&page=1
- sirket, on 10/12/2007, -9/+18DDALES- And yet somehow- on the very front page of CNN- is an article about Congress needing to be ready for the backlash from the execution of Iraqi civilians by US Marines- along with a possible coverup. Seems like one of us is deluded and it isn't me.
- dogside, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11@ chosenone; Are you really that stupid? Did you ever even pay attention in health class? Apparently not. HIV is an abbreviation for Human Immunodeficiancy Virus. Its a virus that ***** up your immune system. AIDS is an abbreviation for Aquired Immune Deficiancy Syndrome. AIDS is the state your body is in when the HIV ***** up your immune system. It is a syndrome. Try and tell me that the HIV doesnt cause AIDS dumbass.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10What's to not understand? This was an IV drug for Hemopheliacs. That means it was injected. While you are somewhat right about the virus not lasting outside the body for long, this was still living in plasma where it could live.
There are two problems with this finger pointing though.
1) It's the job of the plasma and blood banks to do the testing of the specimen. These are the companies that should face the first of the criticism (and legal actions).
2) While this was reported over 3 years ago it actually happened in the early/mid 80s before everything was know about HIV. The U.S. had (and still has) much stricter laws regarding pharmaceuticals than most of the world. Spain, France and many other countries didn't see this (or ban pharmaceuticals "tainted" by HIV) as a threat.
While Bayer should be heald financially liable, it was not criminal on their behalf (at least not with malice). There just wasn't enough known about the disease at the time. Blame your government and their lax when it comes to identifying a threat. - mookme, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Aidenag: Zyklon B was originally developed by Fritz Haber and produced by TASCH during World War I not Bayer.
- Ireland, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9In Ireland the current government here is as corrupt as they get, but if this is true it's even low by their standards, and that's very low.
- Otto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Oh for crying out loud, the article makes it perfectly clear.
1. The drug is injectable, and it's for hemophilliacs (people who's blood doesn't clot normally). It's made from donor blood, which is how it could have HIV.
2. At the time that this was done, there was no reliable test for HIV, so the dude saying "they knew it was infected with AIDS" is not true. They may have known it was a bad batch, but they didn't know it it had HIV in it because in the early 80's nobody knew wtf HIV was.
3. As has been stated, they're a GERMAN company. US laws prevented them selling the drug here after it was shown to have problems, but they are based in *****' GERMANY. How is the US supposed to stop them from selling their drug outside the country?
Bayer is at fault for selling bad drugs, granted. They knew it was bad. What they didn't know was that it had HIV, or that it was killing people (HIV takes *years* to kill somebody). All they knew was that it made some people sick and so it was a bad batch. The fact that they resold it in other markets is indeed reprehensible, but why is this guy bitching about the US not doing anything? The people responsible are either dead (this being 20 years old now) or in Germany. - spyder91, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I knew I had seen that video before... Even when I saw it, a year or two after it was originally produced, I couldn't really find any base of people who had even heard about it. I guess that shows you how many people watch MSNBC.
- zediker, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9chosenone:
AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus
HIV is a retrovirus that primarily infects vital components of the human immune system such as CD4+ T cells, macrophages and dendritic cells.
These make up most of your Auto-Immune system, which protects you from bacterial infections and viruses that your body recognizes.
AIDS is a status point you reach when your body's immune system has been severely weakened by the HIV virus. Allowing a normaly 'harmless' infection, to kill you.
Thus it is said that HIV directly causes AIDS, because AIDS cannot be reached without the involvement of the HIV virus. If you were to find a way to completely eliminate the HIV virus from someones system, they would not get AIDS, or if they had AIDS, the immune system would eventualy recover, and they would no-longer have AIDS. - GreenLantern33, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6This is crazy. I can't believe I have never heard of this before.
Here is an article I found:
http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/0503/22.php - vampirical, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6From Wikipedia:
"Bayer became part of IG Farben, a conglomerate of German chemical industries which formed the financial core of the Nazi regime. IG Farben was the main supplier of Zyklon B, a chemical used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. When the Allies split IG Farben after World War II for involvement in several Nazi war crimes, Bayer reappeared as an individual business."
Bayer is such a wholesome company. Seems as though America is catching a lot of flack over something a German country did, and apparently what one FDA official said. The main point should be that Bayer is an unethical company, or at least was up until the eighties. In all fairness they may have shapped up in the roughly twenty years since then. - RareSaturn, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9Witch hunt?? Are you being serious?
- david76, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6From the NYT article:
"The medicine, called Factor VIII concentrate, essentially provides the missing ingredient without which hemophiliacs' blood cannot clot. By injecting themselves with it, hemophiliacs can stop bleeding or prevent bleeds from starting; some use it as many as three times a week. It has helped hemophiliacs lead normal lives.
But in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, it became a killer. The medicine used pools of plasma from 10,000 or more donors, and since there was still no screening test for the AIDS virus, it carried a high risk of passing along the disease; even a tiny number of HIV-positive donors could contaminate an entire pool."
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/22/1053585647648.html (a reprint of the original NYT article)
This all happened back in the 80s, was reported in the NYT in 2003, and on Scarborough Country in 2006. - quasipalm, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11mstar,
A German corporation sells tainted meds to Spain, Japan, and France. What does this have to do with the US Government?
As far as I can tell, the FDA can't tell those countries how to regulate their meds. The best thing they could have done is alert other countries' governments. - bennypowers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4That's disgusting! I can't believe I've never heard of it before!
- mstar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Are you seriously that dumb?
- mstar, on 10/12/2007, -7/+11Okay, are half the people here brain dead or something? I'll try and leave out any big words.... Bayer is German. So what? The had a known infected product in the US. This was known to have fatal results which could be spread within the populace. For reasons of profit and with the go-ahead from the US government they were allowed to ship this tainted product overseas (from US to somewhere outside the US).
Now, what part of this did some of you miss? - Fragger404, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6@chosenone:
You've got to be kidding me. It's very disappointing that there are still people so ignorant of this disease after all the exposure it's been given.
Anyway, here's some evidence:
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/evidhiv.htm
and in more detail:
http://www.avert.org/evidence.htm
There's your evidence. - mwstratton, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It's all very true and real...I'm a severe factor VIII hemophiliac. I am one of the few survivors.... I was tainted when I was 4.
- dkarlson, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Right on valona. I agree with you completely. It got me very angry that, during the whole Brokeback Mountain media frenzy, many times IT was leading the headlines on cnn.com -- rather than much more important matters such as war, famine, disease, crooked government, etc and etc. Since when is two cowboys in love a bigger thing than lives lost for pointless reasons?
- Phoenixfury, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Bad PR is never good PR.. Just seeing that video clip is enough to persuade me to avoid Beyer products for life! Even if it's just a simple aspirin for a headache, I won't support those greedy killers!
- PSUViking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@Tallmatthew, what you describe as the rules of war is wrong, it's not anything goes at all, and hasn't been for a very long time. There has been a solid legal/moral tradition regarding the use of force, which is embodied in the modern age in the Geneva Convention. Maybe Rambo isn't the best place to learn about the laws of war.
- SilentPurity, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I was thinking the same thing. This is the first time I actually am not able to joke about a story. You guys should see the Constant Gardener, its a movie about evil pharmaceutical companies, and a man who tries to take them down.
- Tuscanspeed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3German company or not, there is a Bayer plant not 10 miles from where I live. They actually put out medications there. So if the drug itself was made inside the US, then yes, the FDA would be involved. Since I saw no mention of which plant the drug came from the whole "they're a german company" ***** is just that.
Pointing out the difference between HIV and AIDS is also just splitting hairs. In my eyes, they're the same as one leads to the other and there is no cure no matter how you spin it. Yes, you can have HIV for years before it goes full blown AIDS. That fact is irrelevent to this story.
Bayer sold a drug outside the US because of something the FDA found wrong with the medication. Doesn't it really matter what it was? The medication was flawed. Plain and simple. It should have gone to the incinerator, not swepped under the rug and sold elsewhere. -
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