HEAL London

There will be a special free showing of the multi-award-winning documentary House of Numbers on Sunday 13th March at 11am. The Cinema is The Shortwave Cinema in Bermondsey at 10 Bermondsey Square, London SE1 3UN.

House of Numbers examines many of the traditional beliefs about HIV/AIDS people take for granted by interviewing many of the worlds top AIDS experts, including Robert Gallo, Luc Montagnier, David Baltimore Robin Weiss, Anthony Fauci, James Curran, James Chin, Donald Francis, and other leading figures in the AIDS orthodoxy, as well as gay men who were heavily involved in gay culture and activism at the time that AIDS hit the public consciousness such as Martin Delaney and the now-late Hank Wilson who died recently. Director Brent Leung also questions several key figures who challenge orthodox perspectives such as Peter Duesberg and Nobel Laureate Kary Mulli. To uncover the facts director Brent Leung visits many desitnations round the world including AIDS hotspots such as South Africa.

House of Numbers has won multiple awards at film festivals including three 'best of festival' and several 'best documentary' awards, including the 'Golden Ace' winner at the Las Vegas film festival. At several film festivals there have been attempts to disrupt screenings. At the Raindance film festival in London in 2009 the organisers received enormous opposition in a bid to prevent the film being screened, prompting Xavier Rashid, one of the programmers and organisers, to say they'd received,

"...A dozen legal letters and threats, and warnings from scientists and HIV victims and solicitors in New York, all trying to make us pull out the film from the festival. Because of all this criticism that it was supposedly denialist we've had to go through it in 15 second intervals...to try and figure out if the criticism had any grounding, and we really did not find anything to corroborate all the criticism we've received... My personal opinion is that it's a fantastic film"  (to hear the full quote click here)

This screening is being organised for a documentary to mark journalist and documentary maker Joan shenton's 20 years of documenting controversy about AIDS. Her company, Meditel, was the first independent TV company to win Documentary of the Year in the UK. After the screening there will be a discussion and a chance to ask questions of a panel including Mike Hersee who runs HEAL London and Dr Christian Fiala, a Viennese Ob/Gyn who has worked extensively in Africa and especially in one of the supposedly most AIDS-hit countries in Africa, Uganda. He was also on former South African president Thabo Mbeki's AIDS panel. There will also be a chance to talk to Joan Shenton and to voice your opinion for the vox-pops.

The Shortwave Cinema, just off tower bridge road, is roughly equidistant from Borough, London Bridge and Bermondsey stations. To book your free place, please send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

German popstar Nadja Benaissa has been found guilty of recklessly infecting her boyfriend with HIV by having unprotected sex with him after she’d been diagnosed HIV positive. But there are a number of clues that raise serious questions about whether she could technically have committed the crime at all.

We're glad to see that Cheryl Cole is well on the way to recovery after her nasty bout of Malaria she apparently picked up in Tanzania. From HEAL London's undercover filming a local doctor in Uganda reported that when he was doing his internship, of the 100 children brought to the hospital each day with what was believed to be Malaria, only 40 would survive. So let's be clear: It certainly was no PR over-dramatisation of the truth on this occasion - she really was in danger.

One advantage she was likely to have over many native Africans though that may have assisted her recovery is that as well as access to the most expensive medical care, is that she at least had access to adequate nutrition on a long term basis. Whether she has actually been partaking of that opportunity sufficiently is not entirely known.

However, even when she is fully recovered the Malaria will leave behind a hidden legacy she would be well to pay heed as within there lurks a hidden danger.

‘Life-saving’ AIDS drug Zidovudine has now been added to the list of environmental toxins that needed to be monitored in case they show up in drinking water, because of its cancer-causing properties, according to the State of California’s Environmental Protection Agency. In their report dated 18^th December 2009, Zidovudine, still most widely known by its original abbreviated name AZT (Azidothymidine) was added to the list with no recognised maximum safe limit declared.

Why would the notion of AZT being in drinking water be a concern? How would it get there? The problem is that when a person takes any drug, quite often not all of it is broken down and utilised within the body, and some is passed out by the body in its original state. AZT even accumulates in semen, according to a Norwegian study, for instance.

This almost inevitably finds its way into the waste water supply which in an increasing number of places, ultimately gets processed into drinking water to some extent. The problem there is that the kind of processes used by water companies that were originally intended to deal with bacteria and other unclean elements, are not necessarily going to be effective against the increasing variety and quantity of pharmaceutical drugs that either get pissed, washed, or flushed into the waste water system.