Aids-related deaths in South Africa: 1 788 230 at noon on Wednesday May 17
Fake ARVs: HIV/Aids organisations in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, have warned people to be on the lookout for individuals selling fake anti-retrovirals (ARVs).
Doctors have been shown ARV capsules filled with maize meal, bought by unsuspecting members of the public at prices far lower than the market rate.
According to Median Dube, an outreach officer with the Matabeleland Aids Council, fake ARVS are available at concessionary prices at flea markets around the city. He said information gathered during interviews with clients suggested the illegal trade in this medication was expanding, and blamed the problem on the lack of ARVs in the public health sector.
Deputy Health Minister Edwin Muguti said he had heard of the reports but the ministry had yet to investigate.
Source: PlusNews
Aids ‘cure’ trial: A court case in Uganda will bring into sharp focus the problem of ensuring that HIV/Aids patients in developing nations get access to effective drugs. It could also signal the end of the road for Elahi Allahgholi.
The Uganda-based Iranian was arrested last month for making and selling what he claimed was an HIV cure. Allahgholi appeared in court this month to hear the charges against him. His trial is due to start on June 23.
Since 2004, he has courted controversy by claiming that his herbal remedy — called Khomeini — can cure HIV/Aids. At up to three million shillings (about R10 500) per dose, the treatment was not cheap. But in a country where only 65 000 of the 1,5million people infected with HIV have access to anti-retrovirals, about 400 people have been willing to pay the price.
According to Ugandan authorities, Khomeini is a sham medicine made of olive oil and honey. They banned its sale last month.
Grace Nambatya, a director of research at the Natural Chemotherapeutic Research Laboratory, said tests proving that Khomeini was neither a drug nor a cure had been done by Mulago Hospital, the Uganda Virus Research Institute and the United Kingdom-based Medical Research Council.
Last week, 76 of Allahgholi’s clients sent a petition to Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni to protest against the ban on Khomeini and to call for the government to subsidise access to it.
It is not the first time a supposed HIV cure has caused controversy in Uganda. In 1998, the government banned a pill developed by a Ugandan doctor who marketed it as an HIV/Aids therapy. Last year, the pill was approved for sale, but only as a vitamin supplement.
In the early 1990s, a woman known as Nanyonga sparked the craze of eating soil after she claimed it could cure HIV/Aids.
Source: SciDev.Net
Aids-related deaths in South Africa: 1 774 955 at noon on May 3
Source: AFP