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10/23/2004:

"Traditional healers bewitch Africa's fight against Aids"

by John Reed
Ibrahimo Soba, a traditional healer, sees patients in his one-room practice on the outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique's capital. As incense wafts and Brazilian telenovelas blare from a television set, he dispenses herbal remedies for an array of afflictions including tuberculosis, impotence and increasingly HIV/Aids.

For patients recently infected with HIV, Mr Soba prescribes a thrice-daily regimen of palm oil, rock salt and an indigenous herb called tondulo dissolved in water. He also slices their arms with a razor and administers a "vaccine".

It is made of HIV-infected dried blood burned first, he insists, "to avoid reinfecting people". Like many of his peers, he claims he can purge HIV from some infected patients' bodies, a feat not yet managed by western medicine.

Millions of Africans seeking health care or spiritual comfort turn first to traditional healers such as Mr Soba. The World Health Organisation estimates that up to 80 per cent of the continent's population uses traditional medicine.

Healers form an ancient and enduring part of the social fabric. They are trusted figures in areas where bewitchment or ancestral wrath are commonly believed to be causes of disease.

But the Aids epidemic has focused new attention and sparked a lively debate on the role of the largely unregulated sector. With life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) drugs available to only a minority of the estimated 25m Africans with HIV, traditional healers have been quick to step in. South Africa, with an estimated 5.6m with HIV, passed its first law regulating their work in September.

Authorities in Mozambique, where about 14 per cent of the population is HIV-positive, are trying to rein in unscrupulous practitioners who charge large sums for Aids "cures". In extreme cases traditional healers can endanger patients' health by re-using razor blades or concocting remedies using untreated water.

"Most traditional healers try to follow basic health rules," says Dr Joao Manuel Carvalho Fumane, director of Mozambique's National Institute of Health. "But we also realise we have charlatans people who claim they are a kind of god that can save people and solve all their problems."

Mozambican newspapers abound in advertisements promising to treat Aids or, in one commonly used euphemism, "incurable diseases".

Mozambique, unlike many other African countries, has an Aids treatment plan that aims to put up to 400,000 people on ARVs over five years. But given the limits of the health infrastructure Dr Carvalho Fumane estimates that ARVs will reach only about half the people who need them.

Full Article: ft.com

I would suggest that superior Westerners who mock traditional medicine should keep their mouths shut until they find a cure for AIDS. Also, if they are so concerned about 'charlatans,' you'd think they would come up with enough ARV's to treat everyone. Pharmaceutical corporations have raised charlatanism to a high art: takes one to know one.