HEALTH-RWANDA: People Flock to Herbalists for AIDS Treatment

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jean Baptiste Kayigamba

KIGALI, Aug 17 1998 (IPS) - The high cost of medical treatment and drugs has pushed many Rwandans infected with the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) virus to put their fate in the hands of herbalists.

Traditional healers have set up shop in several neighbourhoods throughout the Rwandan capital of Kigali, and are now competing with each other to attract patients to their door.

One of these herbalists, Thacien Mbarute, has hung out his shingles in a ramshackle garage in the Lower Kiyovu suburb where many low-income civil servants live. Packed in small tins, he distributes to patients a herbal concoction called ‘GMA 2000’, which he promotes as a cure for AIDS.

Mbarute charges about 1000 Rwandan Francs (about three U.S. dollars) for the first visit and 6000 RF (about 18 U.S. dollars for subsequent visits.

The herbalist refutes charges that his drug is a fake concoction with no medical value, saying that he and a team of traditional healers began research on the use of herbs to cure AIDS in 1984.

“What we know is that most of these patients affirm that this drug (GMA 2000) works very well. That it cures opportunistic diseases like skin rashes and diarrhoea,” the herbalist says.

The lack of funds to continue their work put a stop to the herbalists idea of a joint venture with pharmacists in Bombay, India to expand their work, Mbarute says.

One young woman, who became aware in 1992 that she had been infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), says that Mbarute’s treatment has helped her skin rashes.

“With the herbalist’s treatment, all rashes are gone, and you can see, my skin is smooth again,” the woman says, displaying both of her arms.

But despite Mbarute’s growing popularity, the Rwandan government has ordered him to close shop. “How can you treat people in a motor garage?” asked the director of the National Programme for AIDS Control, Dr Innocent Ntaganira.

“I visited his clinic and held discussions with him,” he told IPS. “He has no scientific evidence for his medicine,” adds the AIDS control director who has written to the Minister of Health to stop the herbalist from practising medicine. “If he refuses, he will be prosecuted,” warned Ntaganira.

While the herbalists believe they provide the majority of Rwandans with affordable medicine and treatment, government health officials say the traditional medicines are doing more harm than good.

Recently, the Minister of Health Vincent Biruta issued a stern warning to the healers scattered around the country, blaming them for the deaths of 80 percent of the people treated by them in the rural areas.

Health officials also remember the case of a Zairean doctor, Ruhuma Zirimwabagabo, who took the Rwandan capital by storm in the early 1990s with false claims of a cure for AIDS.

The first AIDS case was identified in Rwanda in 1983. Recent statistics show that AIDS is second to malaria as a cause of death. AIDS prevalence in the adult population is estimated at 11.1 percent.

“Our people are dying at a horrific rate. If we do not get serious with this epidemic, in 50 years to come, AIDS will have exterminated a large part of the population,” the technical advisor of Health Population at the Ministry of Health, Dr Warren Namara, says.