Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Good Night, Crazy Lady.

Christine Maggiore, founder of the Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives organization, died this past week. Why does this matter?
Christine Maggiore, an activist who vehemently denied that HIV causes AIDS, declined to take anti-AIDS drugs and sued Los Angeles County for stating that her 3-year-old daughter succumbed to AIDS-related pneumonia, has died. She was 52.

Maggiore died at her Van Nuys home on Saturday. She had been treated for pneumonia in the past six months, but her official cause of death was pending, county coroner Assistant Chief Ed Winter said Tuesday.

He said it was unclear whether her death was AIDS-related. She was diagnosed with human immunodeficiency virus in 1992.

She was also the lady who wrote the What if everything you knew about AIDS was wrong? book. Granted, some of the points about the tests -- that there is a chance of false positive, that some things do "trigger" a positive result that are not HIV -- and about alternative treatments -- which do, in fact, complement traditional Western medicine nicely -- are completely valid...

...lady, you're a nutjob, your research has been debunked, and the only people you were helping in the end...

...was yourself.

Good night, crazy lady.

(And I'm not going to spare it, really, I'm glad she's dead. And I hope an autopsy is performed, and I hope they find that AIDS killed her, and I hope it's about time that people stopped their internalized fear of their own disease and stopped giving nutjobs a soapbox. Her cause would have died years ago had it not been for the internet... she did so much more harm than the bit of good she was as the establishment's devil's advocate.)

1 comment:

The Seeker said...

Wow, wtf was going through her head? God, is this what humanity is coming to??? jeez...