Wall Street Journal
--adapted from "Voodoo History - The Role of the 
Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History" by David 
Aaronovitch (Amazon.com: http://xrl.us/VooHist )

This season's fashion in conspiracy theories concerns 
health. The Web sites, marginal cable shows and radio 
phone-ins are full of tales about how Big Pharma and 
Bad Government are deliberately spreading diseases or 
manufacturing scares in order to sell us expensive 
drugs, gull us into dangerous vaccinations or just 
simply to create an atmosphere of panic which will 
allow "them" to take over.

Swine flu? The disease was created in a lab by a 
shadowy company, which had associations with ultra-
baddies Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Israel, and 
released to sell the company's top product. HIV? 
According to a documentary called "House of Numbers," 
now doing the rounds of the highbrow film festivals, 
the link between HIV and AIDS is a fiction developed by 
pharmaceutical companies and AIDS activists to boost 
the profits of the former and the jobs of the latter. 
Cervical cancer vaccination? As one of my wife's 
acquaintances put it in an anguished round-robin email 
a few weeks ago, "girls have died in the U.S." from the 
vaccination, and the pharmaceutical companies know, but 
don't care as long as they make their profits.

We live in age of conspiracies, or rather, we are more 
aware of conspiracy theories than we used to be. 
Theories involving the hidden hand reproduce on the 
Internet and instantly jump borders...

Continued: http://xrl.us/Consp