From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia's president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the ribcage of the patient--a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS. The patient is then ordered to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas. YahyaJammeh has refused to disclose details of his herbal concoction, saying only that it uses seven plants, “three of which are not from Gambia.” The treatments are repeated over a 30-day period, during which patients must abstain from drinking alcohol, tea and coffee. They also cannot eat kola nuts or have sex.
In a continent suffering from the world's worst AIDS epidemic, Jammeh's claims of a miracle cure are alarming public health workers already struggling against superstition and distrust of the West. The biggest concern is that the Gambian leader requires patients to cease their anti-retroviral drugs, a move that risks weakening their immune systems and making them even more prone to infection.
Since January, Jammeh has thrown the bureaucratic machinery of this small West African country behind the claim. The last six news releases on Gambia's official Web site are dedicated to the president's treatment, available to Gambians free of charge. Regular radio and TV addresses publicize it and the Health Ministry has issued a declaration of support.
Although the HIV rate is relatively low in Gambia com-pared to other African nations — 1.3 percent of the country's 1.6 million people are infected — the president's claim has left interna-tional health organizations in a bind. Jammeh, a 41-year-old former army colonel who gained control in a 1994 coup, sayshis treatment is entirely voluntary and argues that his medications cannot be mixed with other drugs because "I don't want any complications."
Jammeh has gone to great lengths to prove his claim, send-ing blood samples of his first nine patients to a lab in Senegal for testing. According to those tests, four of the nine had undetectable viral loads, one had a moderate viral load and three had high loads, a result posted on the gov-ernment's Web site as proof of the cure. However, the lab technician who performed the tests warned they are not conclusive since the blood samples were only taken after the treatment. "You can't prove that some-one has been cured of AIDS from just one [post-treatment] test. You have to establish that a patient actually had AIDS in the first place. It's dishonest of the Gambian government to use our results in this way," said Dr. Coumba Toure Kane, of Cheikh Anta Diop University.
Despite the lack of evidence, there are few in the Gambia who dare doubt this 'miracle'. The President controls the media and the only message his people are hearing is that the treatment works, and patients are now queuing up outside his door. President Jammeh cures AIDS on Thursdays and asthma on Saturdays-- the rest of the time he runs the country he's ruled for 12 years. It's a place which attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year, and was until recently considered progressive in its approach to AIDS. Organizations which run orthodox programs to combat the spread of the virus now fear all of their work is being undone.
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