The Department of Health and Human Services' Public Health Service sponsored a minority AIDS conference that featured a panel titled "Is AIDS Medical Genocide?" According to a Public Health Service official, the panel was included to "address many of the AIDS theories that have gained currency over the years in both ethnic and nonethnic communities." The panel included Abdul Alim Muhammad, the health minister of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, who has some theories of his own. On a radio talk show in 1987, he speculated that AIDS was "perhaps hatched in the international banking community as a means of depopulating Africa ... so that the Europeans and perhaps even the Russians, the South Africans and the Israelis could have a depopulated continent" so they could plunder its mineral resources. "Maybe the Americans and Russians had such a plan or scheme."

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