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PubMed2004

Defining minimum standards of practice for incorporating African traditional medicine into HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and support: a regional initiative in eastern and southern Africa.

In many resource-poor settings of Africa, a majority of people living with HIV/AIDS depend on and choose traditional healers for psychosocial counseling and health care. If the current pan-African prevention and care efforts spurred by the HIV pandemic do not actively engage African Traditional Medicine, they will effectively miss 80%, the vast majority of the African people who, according to the World Health Organization, rely on traditional medicine for their primary health care needs. In 2001, the Ugandan nongovernmental organization, Traditional and Modern Health Practitioners Together Against AIDS and Other Diseases, in Kampala, identified the need for a concerted, systematic, and sustained effort at both local and regional levels to support and validate African Traditional Medicine on several fronts. The Eastern & Southern Africa Regional Initiative on Traditional Medicine and AIDS was borne out of this assessment. It convened a regional consultation in May 2003, which produced a series of proposed standards around six main themes related to traditional medicine and HIV/AIDS: the systematic evaluation of traditional remedies; spiritual aspects of healing; HIV prevention and care; processing and packaging of traditional remedies; protection of indigenous knowledge; and intellectual property rights related to traditional health systems. These standards, summarized in this paper, will be incorporated into programs on traditional medicine and HIV/AIDS by various implementers in the region. A number of strategies to test and implement these recommendations are also defined.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome↗
PubMed1995

"Immune" Nairobi women also have "killer" T-cells.

Further evidence that so-called "killer T-cells" could be the key to an HIV-vaccine has come from "immune" sex-workers in Nairobi, Kenya. Earlier this year, British researcher Sarah Rowland-Jones discovered a group of sex-workers in Gambia, West Africa, who seemed to be immune to HIV-infection. Study of six of the women's blood revealed that five had the T-cells, which seek out and destroy infected cells. T-cells are produced as part of the immune-system's response to infection. A second group of 30 "immune" sex-workers had been noted by social scientists in Nairobi. In April 1995, Rowland-Jones studied six of these women and again found that five had the T-cells. However, because the six Kenyan women were all of the same genetic group, the results are far from conclusive. One explanation for the women's resistance in Gambia is that they were first infected with HIV-2--a weaker strain of HIV prevalent in West Africa and India. In Nairobi, the women may have first been exposed to a defective HIV-1 virus, or their immunity may be the result of a rare genetic make-up. Rowland-Jones will return to Gambia at the end of this year to study a larger cross-section of sex-workers.

Africa↗