Binti, 49, a Kenyan woman living with AIDS, has a heart-rending story to tell. She has been to hell and back literally. Strong-willed, charming and talkative with a happy-go-lucky attitude, her once beautiful light complexion slightly belies the fact that she once suffered a skin disease that created dark sports on her face and hands. I was never born with these created dark spots on her face and hands. I was never born with these spots, my skin had always been spotless, she says cheerfully.
Binti has been living with the HIV for close to 15 years. One of the fist Kenyans to have contracted HIV, she lived with the virus for 10 years without knowing it. In those 10 years, I suffered all manner of sickness and at one point, I was doubly convinced that indeed I must have been bewitched, she recalls.
It is not difficult to see why. She comes from a community where claims of being bewitched and commonplace: the Luo who are concentrated in western Kenya in Nyanza Province.
Having been brought up in the city by strict Christian parents, Binti got married to a fellow Luo in the mid 80s and soon had children.
But tragedy struck her young family five years into her marriage when her husband passed away after a short illness. My husband began wasting away from a strange disease that nobody understood at all, says Binti, I was confused. After we went through the normal traditional rites and buried him, people started saying all soughts of things, suggesting that there could have been foul play on my part. I refused to listen to them, she recalls. I was a born-again Christian and I'm still one.
But when her first-born son died two years later, she began doubting her Christian faith. My son died from the strange disease that had ostensibly killed my husband.
Something seemed very wrong, the sickness was inexplicable, yet what hurt her most were innuendoes by her in-laws: that she had killed their son (meaning their brother) and because of that her son had died as a punishment. Their unflinching position was that their brother did not die from a strange ailment but from chira, Binti says.
According to a belief among the community, chira is supposed to be a disease that wastes away a person slowly until his/her death. It is supposed to be the result of a cultural curse for defying some of the Luo traditional rites.
For Binti, the worst was yet to come. Soon she fell ill herself and that is when she truly believed she had been cursed. Regarded and treated as an abomination, Binti fled her matrimonial home in Nairobi to Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean coast, to escape the torment, shame and confusion.
Of course by now, she had heard remotely of HIV/AIDS but could not connect it to her situation. I'd been married properly, I'd never wavered in my marriage and even when my husband died, I reused to be inherited or re-married, she says implying that she did not engage in extra-marital relations.
The long and short of this story is that by the time Binti was diagnosed with HIV in 2000, she had become so sick she could hardly move from her bed.
She even had contemplated suicide. I knew the forces of customary curse had finally caught up with me and I begged my God to take me and spare me painful suffering.
But this article is not about Binti and her long painful suffering. Rather, it is about the evolution of science in understanding HIV/AIDS infection and how African scientists and institutions have helped to demystify and de-culturalise a strange ailment that has afflicted about 30 million in sub-Saharan Africa.
On a superstitious continent, superstitions surrounding HIV/AIDS have only helped to add fuel to an inferno.
From ancient Timbuktu in West Africa to metropolitan Cape Town, cultural practices have held the cursed continent captive as its peoples continue to waste away from a strange disease that can only come through bewitching and cultural abomination.
To rid itself of the terrible curses, the continent has come up with counter-superstitions, but these have only compounded the aggravating HIV/AIDS numbers.
In southern Africa, from poor Malawi to economic giant South Africa, men have turned to raping little girls believing that the act will cure them of HIV.
When the men are not raping children, they are resorting to sex with virgins in the belief that this will miraculously cause the virus to disappear.
But even more disheartening is the fact that many African men are averse to condom, citing excuses such as that it is un African and that the latex rubber reduces sexual enjoyment.
As a result, 15 million are already dead and in the next five years, 10 million more people are expected to die in Africa.
The latest grim statistics are that even though sub-Saharan African contains 10 per cent of the world's population, it accounts for a whopping two-thirds of the 40 million people living with HIV and 77 per cent of AIDS deaths.
Yet, it is Botswana, the richest country in Africa, that HIV/AIDS has caused havoc. Twenty per cent of the tiny population of 3 million are infected with AIDS.
It is no less wonder that it is in Botswana that science and medical/scientific institutions have taken up the battle against HIV/AIDS to forestall a possible wiping out of an entire generation of young people.
Two years ago, the diamond rich southern African state became the first country to offer expensive but life-saving antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) and other medications to all those who needed them, through the public health system.
Yet, for all practical purposes, that is still a drop in the ocean, considering that only 30,000 people of the 30 million (1:3000) in Africa to date have access (ARVs). Dr Catherine Sozi, a Ugandan doctor working for UNAIDS, cautions that many African doctors need crash courses on ARV treatment and issues.
Dr Banu Khan of the National AIDS Coordinating Agency (NACA) of Botswana says that the government has set a target of 19,000 people for enrolment in their first year of ARVs treatment in a $275 million programme in which people who require the drugs will get them forlife.
A state-of-the-art laboratory at the Princess Marina Hospital, is spearheading the programme. The laboratory Harvard Botswana has been conducting research for effective treatment of HIV/AIDS including vaccine development.
In Uganda, a country that was ravaged by the pandemic, reducing some villages to near depletion in the 80s and 90s, rehistoric and leading learning institution has been struggling to find a vaccine fro the last decade. Makerere University is currently spearheading the research.
The Vaccine Research Centre of the National Institute of Allergy has developed a HIV-1 DNA vaccine, which has been on trial since January 2005.
In Kenya, Dr Moses Otsyula, head of the Virology Department, Institute of Primate Research (IPR), has been developed an animal model to test vaccines. Dr Otsyula, ecstatic about his team's work, recently said that the development was a breakthrough and will certainly turn around HIV/AIDS research in the country.
Through the animal model, stated Dr. Otsyul, scientists are spared the abhorrent experience of using humans as guinea pigs.
The animal module entails inoculating an animal with a vaccine, then challenging the vaccine with a retrovirus called Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) to test whether it works.
A Kenya premier HIV/AIDS researcher, Prof. Job Bwayo of the University of Nairobi and principal investigator and founder of the Kenyan Vaccine Initiative (KVI), has been involved in the search for vaccine.
Already, his team of researchers has developed the first phase trail of a DNA vaccine, the first human trails designed specifically for a strain of HIV common in Africa.
Says Prof. Bwayo: Phase I gives us courage. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and Kenyans are good in the marathon.
It is not for nothing that leading African scientists have been working overtime to develop a workable vaccine.
At the AIDS conference in 2000 in Durban, South Africa, African scientists took up the challenge of coming up with a vaccine for Africans by calling on the governments, regional and international agencies, industry and donors to speed up research and testing. Dr. William Malegapuru Makgoba, the chairman of the African AIDS Vaccine Programme and president of the Medical Research Council of South Africa, who spearheaded the South African Vaccine Initiative (SAAVI), points out that vaccine developments are being promoted and reinforced.
He says, A new African strategy for an HIV vaccine hopes to fast track HIV vaccine developments in Africa to achieve results in the shortest time possible. African scientists involved in the development and search for a scientific are optimistic of a vaccine.
Says Dr. Makaki Owili, secretary of the Society on AIDS in African (SAA); Our full involvement (in the development of a HIV/AIDS vaccine) will ensure that these trails are conducted to the highest ethical and scientific standards.
The SAA secretary adds, A safe and effective preventive vaccine that is accessible and affordable in Africa is our best hope to control the AIDS epidemic in the continent.
Kenyan researchers such as D. Mbori-Ngacha and E. Marum of the Centre For Disease Control (CDC) in Nairobi argue that approaches to HIV/AIDS are poorly adapted to the crisis in Africa because the issue has not been defined and addressed as an infectious disease emergency.
Most infectious diseases, including AIDS, are preventable, say the scientists, thus the critical role that science is supposed to play in finding a cure for HIV.
The centre notes: On the basis of epidemiological data, HIV/AIDS is the greatest threat to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness and prosperity.
The scientists who have pioneered the research and studies, point out that HIV/AIDS has changed in the last 20 years. Incidence and mortality in industrialized countries have fallen and pediatric HIV has almost been eliminated as a public health issue, largely through anti retroviral drugs.
According to the scientists argument, the advent of the therapy in industrialized countries has greatly increased motivations for people to be tested for HIV and reduced the stigma associated with the disease.
One of the fiercest debates today in continental Africa is how to access HIV/AIDS medical treatment, they say, adding that recent advances in therapy have led to dramatic improvements in the quality and quantity of life of patients not able to access ARVs.
Fundamentally, the question in Africa is: What is the use of these life-saving medicines for treating HIV/AIDS if a large majority of patients who badly need them cannot access them?
The issue of access to care and ARVs is now a topic of high-level international discussion.
There is no doubt that Africa would benefit from an approach to based on a public health model, which includes voluntary counseling, testing, partner notifications, routine HIV testing in services such as prevention of mother-to-child transmission, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, and tests for patients seeking treatment for other diseases such as tuberculosis (TB).
