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61 HIV PATIENTS IN KENYA SHOW NO SIGNS OF HIV 18 MONTHS AFTER STOPPING MEDICATION

By Paul Letiwa

Apparent Cure Based On Alternative Explation To The Cure Of Timothy Ray Brown - The Berlin Patient

(This article was first published by Daily Nation, a leading Newspaper in Kenya. The original title of the article was 'HIV ‘FUCTIONAL CURE’ SHOWING GREAT DEVELOPMENT IN KENYA')

A classical-blog-style version of this article can be found at https://www.kenread.com/index.html?article_id=143

An ongoing trial to develop a fully functional cure to eradicate HIV infection in Kenya has shown a huge improvement since the process begun four years ago.

So far about 61 patients appear to have overcome the HIV virus after frequent lab tests from the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) and other independent labs show that their viral loads have been undetectable for over 18 months, raising hopes of a cure for a disease still deemed incurable but manageable.


One of those who appear to have been ‘cured’ through this process is 43-year-old Alex. (His full name and the names of other patients interviewed for this article cannot be published in order to protect doctor-patient confidentiality and their own individual identities).

Alex says he tested HIV positive six years ago and immediately started taking antiretroviral medications to try and maintain a healthy lifestyle as directed by the doctor. His continued to use the ARVs to boost his health, but the father of three said he did not see so much change on his body.

“After a few months of taking ARVs to tame the spread of the Virus in my body I started developing side effects. It reached a point where my body developed drug resistance. I went to see the doctor and he told me ARVs no longer work against the enzymes, making the drugs ineffective against viral infection. He recommended that the most effective treatment to halt HIV replication in my body is to employ a combination of three drugs. Which I did, but it didn’t help much.”

Alex did not lose hope. He tried to do more research on how he could tame the raging virus in his body. And during his online research he came across a story published in the Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper about one Dr Simon Barasa, a pharmacist who has been conducting HIV research for more than five years.

“I decided to search for Dr Barasa. I later found him after we exchanged emails. In his clinic where he works with a team of health specialists I found a number of other HIV patients. He asked that I get tested and I agreed to undergo his treatment,” he explained.

After a few months using Dr Barasa’s set of drugs, he noticed some improvement in his body. By the end of 2014 he said he started feeling better and recent tests from Kemri and two other private labs have shown that he is free from the HIV virus.

Other patients who have shown signs of cure are Nancy and Dorcas. The two have similar happy-outcome stories to that of Alex.

It took Nancy, a Nairobi-based businesswoman about three months before she realized something was not right with her body. She went for a test after confronting her sexual partner who confessed that he was HIV-positive and on ARVs.

At Nairobi Women's Hospital where she went for a test, the doctor, told her to return after 90 days since it takes three months for the virus to be detected in an antibody test, or what is commonly referred to as a VCT test.

However, Nancy could not wait for 90 more days to confirm her status, and so she did further tests in four different hospitals to be sure of her condition. She still tested negative.

It was at Kemri, one of Kenya’s most advanced laboratories that her worst fears were confirmed. She was HIV-positive. Frustrated Nancy also consulted Dr Barasa’s advice who noted that her documents showed that the lab detected 38 copies/ML of the virus, and Dr Barasa immediately started her on his treatment process.

Dr Barasa and his team of HIV researchers then referred her to Lancet Lab, located in the Upper Hill area of Nairobi, for a viral load test to determine if she had any trace of the virus.

After three months of follow-up and intensive treatment, coupled with consistent laboratory monitoring, Dr Barasa and his team sent her back to Lancet Lab for further testing, and her results came out as ‘undetectable’, implying that she had very little virus in her body to be detected.

Six months after the exposure, Nancy decided to do another HIV antibody test at Crescent Medical Aid Kenya and it turned negative. Dr Barasa then asked her to return to Kemri for a test similar to the one she had done in March 2013.

The results not only shocked her, but also the staff at Kemri. Nancy was HIV-negative! Antibody tests on her still turn negative and consecutive visits to Kemri have confirmed the same.

Another patient, Dorcas who tested positive nine years ago also shares a similar story that later changed her HIV status. “I also started using ARVs as recommend be doctors. After a while I begun feeling weak, had no appetite and my hair began to thin,” she says. “And then I started getting these persistent joint pains and muscle soreness that almost crippled me.”

“I met Dr Barasa and his other team of scientists and he insisted that he had to first test me to confirm my HIV status,” says Dorcas, “He requested Amref, who had been monitoring my progress, to forward him my medical history. He then put me on his treatment and, after six months, I noticed some improvement. A year later I feel better and tests have shown that I am free of the HIV virus.”

So, is this the real cure for HIV? Or is Dr. Barasa’s cocktail of drugs playing a wily game with Kenya’s laboratories?

Well, according to his years of research published in the leading online medical journals, the pharmacist believes he is onto something huge. He, however, advises that, for the ‘cocktail’ to be effective enough, the patient must be started on it early enough.

People who are already exposed but cannot test positive in an antibody test, he writes in his HIV research document, should do further tests — such as a viral load test — to verify if indeed they have traces of the virus in their bloodstream.

This would ensure that doctors have a clear history of the patient and can easily monitor progress.

In 2014, The Daily Nation newspaper published a story on Dr Barasa and his scientific study on HIV cure and the progress he has been making to try and curb the deadly virus.

The three patients interviewed for this story were the first to try Dr Barasa’s treatment. And because of the Daily Nation stories and the huge prospects of his lab work, Dr Barasa attracted a lot of foreign interest, with international scientists expressing desire to understand how his ‘functional cure’ could be taking the world closer to a true cure of the virus.

Dr Barasa, however, says this is not an outlandish, grossly unconventional effort because the treatment he applied to his patients was based on the world’s first known cure of HIV: that of Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco, who is also known as ‘The Berlin Patient’.

Forty-seven-year-old Brown was diagnosed with HIV in 1995 and put on ARVs but in 2006 developed leukemia — blood cancer — and for that reason was given a bone marrow transplant with a rare gene mutation that provides natural resistance to HIV.



His doctor, Gero Hutter, said this resistance seemed to have been transferred to Brown. But Dr Barasa disputes the doctor’s assessment of the cure of Brown, arguing that it was the removal of the patient’s bone marrow that did it.



“Removing the bone marrow, where the CD4 cells replicate, denied the virus the capacity to replicate and, consequently, the patient was cured of HIV,” he argues, adding that he has demonstrated ‘HIV cure’ in his five patients by stopping rapid multiplication of CD4 progenitor cells in the bone marrow, where the HIV virus hides to avoid elimination by the immune system.



If the claims are true, then this Kenyan researcher will have achieved the first complete cure without bone marrow transplantation anywhere in the world.



“Bone marrow transplantation is a very expensive, specific and dangerous procedure, which makes Brown’s treatment impossible to apply to the more than 30 million people with HIV,” he says. “But I think purging the virus from some specific locations where it seems to hide is the way out to eradicate it.”



Medical doctors using antiretroviral drug therapy are able to bring down a patient’s viral load to undetectable levels, but once the patient stops the medication the viral load goes up again. This means there is a reservoir in the body where the virus is hiding and the ARVs are not able to reach, which turns out to be in some parts of the bone marrow.

“Get rid of this reservoir and, theoretically, you are home and dry,” writes Dr Barasa.

And so, to attack that seemingly impossible-to-reach reservoir, he uses a technique that comprises the use of the cancer drug methotraxate, in combination with other agents, to eliminate the virus hiding in the bone marrow.

Methotrexate is used to treat cancer but is indicated to have very serious side effects, thus should not be used without advice from a competent physician. Dr Barasa chose it for his trials after a retrospective study showed it to be most useful for lymphomas, which are a type of cancer affecting lymphocytes.

Dr. Barasa believes that the HIV virus requires the presence of progenitors of lymphocytes in order to reproduce – progenitor is a scientific term that means a cell that creates other types of cells. In an HIV-infected bone marrow, the progenitors are also HIV infected, and thus produce lymphocytes that are HIV infected.

Dr. Barasa reasoned that by temporarily killing off progenitors of lymphocytes in the bone marrow, he would destroy the main source of the HIV virus that eventually spreads to other parts of the body through infected lymphocytes carried by the blood.

After this initial cleansing of the bone marrow, HIV in other parts of an infected body, if not removed, can still re-infect the just disinfected bone-marrow. Progenitors of lymphocytes produce cells at a very high rate in the bone-marrow, and so a patient can quickly re-lapse to HIV-related conditions if this other affected tissue outside the bone-marrow is not treated concurrently with the disinfection process of the bone-marrow.

By appropriate drug therapy, HIV in tissue that is outside the bone-marrow can be destroyed. During treatment, immune system boosters protect the patient from secondary infections as a result of other forms of viruses, as well as bacteria, attacking a body with a compromised immune system.

“The treatment consists of a combination of agents that are given in a way that is tailored to suit individual patients alongside continuous laboratory monitoring, and although the drug is available in local pharmacies on prescription, it must never be used without clear instruction from doctors,” he notes.

Within two weeks after going through the treatment therapy, he says, his patients started showing tremendous improvement and healing of symptoms related to HIV/Aids, then recorded undetectable viral loads in their blood after between eight and 10 weeks.

Some patients have shown undetectable levels of viral loads for over 18 months after stopping taking their AIDs medication at the time of writing the most recent version of this article.

Contact author: pletiwa@gmail.com

NOTE By the Editors Of www.kenread.com

Dr. Barasa would like to convey to the public that he is constrained by regulations from publishing any further articles in the main-stream press until 1000 people have gone through the program. At the current moment, there are a further 120 patients who are being monitored.

If you would like to get in touch with Dr. Barasa, please visit https://www.kenread.com/contact.html and send a message, selecting the subject as "Clinical Trials".
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