Modern and traditional medicine meet in Dakar over AIDS
Regional, Health, 3/12/1999

Modern physicians and traditional healers opened here Thursday a meeting on the AIDS pandemic, as part of the first international congress on traditional medicine and HIV/AIDS, reports the Pan-African news agency PANA.

More than three hundred traditional healers and modern physicians from Africa, America and Europe are taking part in the encounter.

Traditional healers complained that they are being ignored in the fight against the disease.

PANA quoted a traditional healer from Nigeria as saying that traditional healers, including those who had managed to reverse HIV symptoms like diarrhea, found it difficult to consult their colleagues who discourage patients from consulting them.

"The best solution would be to conduct laboratory tests to establish the viral load of patients before and after taking traditional medicine to see the difference," she said during a panel at which viewpoints on traditional medicine were exchanged.A delegate from Mauritania called for caution among African medicine practitioners before coming up with claims for curing AIDS.

Senegalese minister of research, Balla Moussa Daffe, called for complementarity between the two medicines and called African traditional doctors to impart their knowledge to others before dying.

"Traditional healers need to train others so as to perpetuate what has been left behind by our forefathers," the minister said.

According to UN AIDS Program, HIV afflicts over 30 million people, 21 million of whom are in Africa.

Previous Stories:
  AIDS spread limited in the Mediterranean, not so in Africa   (12/2/1998)
  Morocco hosts workshop on assistance for AIDS control associations   (10/22/1998)
  Arab countries discuss prevention of spread of AIDS   (11/24/1997)

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