User:Sussmanbern/kemron

Kemron story

It is a great pity that Wikipedia (and the internet) came so late. I once had a substantial collection of clippings on Kemron but they were long ago discarded. Hopefully, someone will eventually work up a serious history of the Kemron hoax. But here are my recollections, sans sources (I believe much of this was from an article in the early 1990s in The Village Voice): Kemron was low dose oral interferon. It was touted by these two Kenyan doctors, who emphasized (at least for black audiences) that it was an "afrocentric" treatment (in fact the pills were made in Japan, using the interferon formula of a white American). In the US, in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- the same period in which AZT was the only treatment being promoted by real doctors in the US, it was being touted by various Afro-American supporters as a "cure" for AIDS, although Dr Koech was careful to describe it only as a treatment. There were a very few American sources for this drug, which was controlled by the Kenyan marketers, so that American patients were forced to wait long periods with no Kemron available - which interruption of their treatment was used as an excuse for their deaths. The Koech clinic adamantly refused to reveal the formula of its pills to anyone, so that independent attempts at verifying their claims (which always failed to do so) could be dismissed as using the "wrong" formula. American AIDS patients who wanted the full treatment were obliged to travel to Kenya to be treated at the Koech clinic; the entire process was marketed with a particular travel agency and the price was much higher than a regular tourist trip to Kenya. The Koech clinic actually had no nurses or orderlies available, so the AIDS patient was told that he must bring his own attendant with him from America, who must stay with him for the full duration of the treatment (three or four months) -- as the expense for this was almost invariably prohibitive, the patient was almost always forced by circumstances to return home to the US before the end of the clinic treatment, which always gave the Koech clinic an excuse when the patient died. It turned out that the Kenya clinic was extremely sparing about proper AIDS diagnostic testing; it frequently decided that someone had AIDS when they were listless and losing weight (symptoms common among many diseases in Africa), and that someone was pronounced "cured" when these symptoms appeared to diminish, all without the conventional blood tests. As far as I know, no one who had been shown by the bona fide blood test to be infected with AIDS was ever proven by a bona fide blood test to have been cured of it by Kemron. While the patients were at the Kemron clinic they got the drug and some meals prepared in the clinic's kitchen and seemed to improve temporarily (while in Kenya) -- I suspect that the clinic was dosing them secretly with some other medication or maybe a local potion that boosted the appetite and otherwise masked some AIDS symptoms (and some side-effects from AZT dosing disappeared when the patient stopped taking AZT), but this secret dosing was not possible when the patient left Kenya so the encouraging effects disappeared when the patient returned home. At one point one of the Kenyan doctors made a tour of the US and raised a lot of money; ostensibly he was here for "medical lectures" but he never spoke at a medical school or reputable medical institution, instead tickets were sold to laymen - mostly desperate AIDS patients and interested Afro-Americans - for what were sales pitches for the Kemron treatment. There was a period (roughly 1989-1996) when Farrakhan's Nation of Islam heavily touted Kemron; in 1991 the NOI had secured the contract to run the District of Columbia's municipal AIDS clinic (having temporarily wrested it from the reknowned Whitman-Walker Clinic and fired the original staff), during which time it bombarded its patients with anti-AZT/pro-Kemron propaganda, and it was hinted that any lack of support for Kemron among conventional doctors was the result of only racism and white paternalism. In point of fact, the NOI was using its relationship with the DC clinic to extract millions of dollars in government and private grants for AIDS treatment & research. After about 4 years of this sort of Kemron fad among the American black community, during which time progress was made with real medicines, the enthusiasm for Kemron began to wane (and in 1996 the IRS stepped in and shuttered the DC clinic when it became obvious that the NOI was not paying its employees' withholding taxes, and Whitman-Walker was able to retake control of the DC AIDS clinic). Sussmanbern (talk) 19:29, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Among articles available on the internet: A New York Times article from 1990: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/03/world/in-kenya-a-new-aids-drug-gets-mired-in-politics-and-financial-disputes.html?src=pm&pagewanted=2
Another NYT article from 1992 about the failure of other medical teams to corroborate the Koech claims: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/28/health/no-benefit-seen-in-use-of-interferon-in-aids.html This was a double-blind study in Mulago Hospital in Uganda, comparing the efficacy of Kemron versus a placebo - inasmuch as there was no other treatment known at the time, this study was considered ethical and was pursued to the bitter end. It turned out that all the patients - a very substantial number - eventually succumbed to AIDS ... and the ones who had reported slight improvements at various times were mostly the ones receiving the placebo!
It turns out that Dr. Davy Koech is not a Medical Doctor, does not have a medical degree: http://dailykenya.blogspot.com/2012/05/dr-davy-kiprotich-koech-ogw-mbs.html
A brief account, from 1998, of the rise and fall of Kemron: http://mg.co.za/article/1998-03-06-aids-scam-kenya-had-one-too
A similar article: http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/kenyaat50/article/2000096844/kemri-aids-drug-that-failed-to-make-a-mark
By 2011 the Kenya govt had officially turned on Dr. Koech and charged him with fraud and corruption: http://www.eacc.go.ke/PRESSRELEASES.ASP?ID=196

Kemron's attractiveness in the US came at a time when there was no effective AIDS treatment - not merely the absence of a cure, but even of a treatment that would significantly prolong life and delay the debilitating symptoms, so that the disease created a sort of desperation and panic that overcomes good sense. AZT was the respectable medical treatment for a while, but it had very serious and unpleasant side-effects and and it seemed to extend life only by a matter of months. The development of the newer, more effective treatments have helped deflate the Kemron support in North America. I will add now that, while Kemron had a temporary foothold in the AIDS community in the US, especially among Afro-Americans, the Kenyan clinic continued to do business well after Americans lost interest in it, but eventually even the Kenya govt stopped promoting it. Far more recently, in 2007, Yahya Jammeh, the dictator of Gambia claimed to have invented, himself, a "cure" for AIDS that was a secret only he knew and could apply (one way for a dictator to try to secure his position) - which consisted of rubbing an herbal paste on AIDS patients - a paste he refuses to allow doctors to analyze - but only on Thursdays, and for Gambian TV cameras. Gambia's appointed Health Minister says this cure is "medically proven". http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/the-quack-in-gambia-african-despot-cures-aids-a-470231.html . It is entirely possible that this, and similar forms of quackery about AIDS, will persist - mostly, but not exclusively, in the Third World - until an effective and affordable treatment is available there. Sussmanbern (talk) 12:51, 30 May 2014 (UTC) By January 2017 very real and effective treatments for AIDS had become widely accepted and it was then that Jammeh abdicated and fled Gambia, having run the Gambian govt into the ground with corruption and oppression. As far as I can find, his sort of "treatments" are no longer in use. cf BBC, "The President who made people take his bogus HIV cure" (22 Jan 2018) https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-42754150 .Sussmanbern (talk) 12:49, 25 December 2018 (UTC)