Haiti, the international scapegoat!
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By Jean H Charles
Some twenty years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration Service, as well as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), listed the Haitian people as suis generis carriers of the AIDS virus. This ill-conceived classification angered the Haitian Community in the United States to the bone. I was at that time, Assistant Dean of Students at the City College of the City University of New York. I called in a group of Haitian student leaders, they included Gilbert Hyppolite, Mario Jean, and Mildred Trouillot “Aristide”.
We planned together a strategy to organize a march to demonstrate against that ruling. The movement was taken over by the larger community. The rest was history.
Jean H Charles MSW, JD is Executive Director of AINDOH Inc a non profit organization dedicated to build a kinder and gentle Caribbean zone for all. He can be reached at: jeanhcharles@aol.com
On April 20, 1990, some three hundred thousand Haitians and their American and Caribbean friends marched from Brooklyn to City Hall and Battery Park through the Brooklyn Bridge in a frenzy that is still felt today with the recall of the memory.
The CDC retreated from that classification the same evening, advising the world that some Americans, like some Haitians or Jamaicans or Trinidadians might be the victims of a virus that can be contacted when sexual relations occurred with a person who was already an AIDS carrier.
Some twenty years later, Dr Michael Worobey of Arizona State University and Dr Arthur Pichenik came with a new twist to the old story. Patient zero, the first AIDS carrier might have been a Haitian resident, who had acquired the virus in the Congo, Africa.
This so called scientific finding appears on its face without foundation…
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