Brent Leung | The Sifting Sands of HIV Testing

In what may be a real eye opener for many viewers, Leung totally debunks HIV testing. (Can you say "manufacturer’s criteria"?) But who needs faulty HIV testing when the World Health Organization (WHO) has given us the Bangui definition for AIDS which provides a simple list of symptoms to using for diagnosing AIDS without testing? Though moderated nine years later with the admonition that testing should really be done, it did a wonderful job of kick-starting the supposed AIDS epidemic in Africa.

But even with testing, it is quite easy to say that there is more HIV in one place than another, as the tests are interpreted differently in different countries. At one point Leung steps across the Canadian border and cheekily comments, "No other disease behaves differently when you cross the border."

Leung visits South Africa to see the epidemic up close for himself. It’s hard to say what’s more shocking about Leung’s visit to a poor township, the ignorance and superstition that people have about AIDS ("if I get thinner, I may have the disease"), or the flies that travel directly from the open latrines to their lunch plates. Gee, could it be the latter that is making some people sick?

Leung interviews many scientists and doctors in the course of the film. They fall into two groups. The skeptics include, among others, Kary Mullis, who shared a 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry, Joseph Sonnabend, a physician who has been involved with AIDS research and treatment since the very beginning, and James Chin, an epidemiologist at WHO for five years, whose characterization of that agency’s statistics on the AIDS epidemic in Africa gives the movie its name. And of course Peter Duesberg, who was a star cancer researcher – until he was ostracized for questioning the high priests on HIV.


In House of Numbers: Anatomy of an Epidemic, an AIDS film like no other, the HIV/AIDS story is being rewritten. This is the first film to present the uncensored POVs of virtually all the major players; in their own settings, in their own words. It rocks the foundation upon which all conventional wisdom regarding HIV/AIDS is based. House of Numbers could well be the opening volley in a battle to bring sanity and clarity to an epidemic gone awry.

http://www.houseofnumbers.com/index.html