Gambia's president claims he has cure for AIDS

Jammeh has gone to great lengths to prove his claim, sending blood samples of the first nine patients to a lab in Senegal for testing.

A letter on the lab’s stationery indicates that of the nine, four had undetectable viral loads, one had a moderate viral load and three had high loads, a result posted on the government’s Web site as proof of a cure.

However, the lab technician who performed the tests warned they are not conclusive since the blood samples were only taken after the treatment.

“There is no baseline ... You can’t prove that someone has been cured of AIDS from just one data point. It’s dishonest of the Gambian government to use our results in this way,” said Dr. Coumba Toure Kane, head of the molecular biology unit at Senegal’s Cheikh Anta Diop University.

Cabdace Feit / AP Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh, right, prays while administering his alleged herbal HIV cure to a patient, with Secretary of State for Health and Social Welfare, Dr. Tamsir Mbowe, left, rubbing an ointment on the patient.

Waiting in plastic chairs for treatment at the presidential compound last week, Jammeh’s patients said they don’t need lab results to tell them they feel better.

“It feels as if the president took the pain out of my body,” Ousman Sowe, 54, told the AP. Diagnosed with HIV in 1996, he is among the first nine men and women Jammeh has treated and has been under the Gambian leader’s care for nearly a month.

“My appetite has come back and I have gained weight,” said Lamin Ceesay, thin from a nine-year battle with HIV.

Jammeh has refused to disclose details of his herbal concoction, saying only that it uses seven plants, “three of which are not from Gambia.”

‘You will all be cured’
Treatment begins with the president applying the green paste, stored inside a deli-style plastic container. Next comes a gray-colored solution contained in an old Evian bottle and splashed on the patient’s skin. This is followed by a yellowish, tealike brew which patients are asked to drink. The therapy is administered many times over several weeks.

After the treatment session last week, Jammeh emerged carrying a tall wooden staff, a string of Islamic prayer beads and a leather-bound Quran. In front of him, 30 new patients waited on lawn chairs, drawn from the roughly 20,000 people currently living with HIV in Gambia.

He told them that during treatment, they must cease drinking alcohol, tea and coffee. They also cannot eat kola nuts or have sex.

Jammeh then held up the Quran, pointing it at each of the patients: “In the name of Allah, in three to 30 days you will all be cured,” he said.

The patients were then herded into a minibus and driven to an empty hospital ward on the outskirts of the capital, where they will stay in dormitory-style rooms with sheets covering the windows.

Lying on a mat on the tiled floor in the hospital ward, a 19-year-old girl struggled to say her name, spitting gray-colored phlegm into her scarf. Like everyone else in the concrete ward, she is banned from taking anti-retroviral drugs.

Nearby was 25-year-old Amadou Jallow, who recently quit his job at a tourist hotel after his mother was diagnosed with AIDS. In his savings account is $296 — enough, he said, to last him the 30 days Jammeh promises it will take to heal his mother.

“I’m just afraid that, what if my account runs low?” he said. “But by then, I think she will be cured.”

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