MAXIMUM

MUKURU GROUP

 

          Thirty HIV-infected patients were recruited from Mukuru slum from the industrial part of Nairobi at the latter part of 2009.  The thirty patients had never taken ARV’s and were started on the herbal regimen and given some food supply and multivitamins to improve their health conditions.  The herbal regimen itself was refined into a capsule form in order to standardize dosage.  The initial HIV screening, CD4 count and other pertinent diagnostic tests were done by laboratory technologists from Kiambu District Hospital.   At the end of the program on February 2011, three females tested HIV-negative, but they then retested as faintly positive several months later.  They take the herbal remedy when they can afford to come to the clinic (now in Ruaraka section of Garden Estate) to collect their herbal supply.   Unbeknownst to the experimenters, one of these female patients had given the herbal to her son for six months and he turned HIV-negative.  At the time of this writing, the mother’s CD4 count is 1400 cells/mm3 . 

 

          On January 25, 2014, two other female patients from the Mukuru group found out they are now HIV-negative.  They know that their cd4 count is high but were unaware of their HIV-negative status until they were tested on that date.  Both stopped taking the herbal on the dates indicated in the case summaries below.  None of these patients took antiretrovirals.  Both patients are available for interview, and will they will be retested again next year.

 

          Most patients’ clinical condition improved except for one patient who died as a result of immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS). IRIS is a condition when the immune system is boosted by a drug (in her case, the herbal remedy, and in other cases ARV’s) and responds in an abnormal way (severe inflammation, autoimmune, etc.).  Normally, there is a co-infection (in our patient’s case it was tuberculosis) not previously identified because of the patient’s suppressed immune system.  As the immune system is boosted, the deranged response of IRIS manifests.

 

 

(for more information on the patients see video)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHON5R9kDmI

 

          Below is an assessment of a 29 year old married female hawker initially tested HIV-positive on April 2007.  The patient was asymptomatic most of the time during the program.