Despite ridicule, Egypt pushes ahead with AIDS, hepatitis 'cure'

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-egypt-leaders-seek-to-stamp-out-aids-hepatitis-and-dissent-20140628-story.html



Video broadcast on Egyptian state television in February showed a device that the army claims will detect and cure AIDS and hepatitis.

Despite ridicule, Egypt pushes ahead with AIDS, hepatitis 'cure'
Laura King
6.28.2014

Egypt’s military on Saturday pressed ahead with promotion of a fanciful device it claims can diagnose and cure AIDS and hepatitis, announcing that it would be tested in the next six months on larger numbers of patients in army hospitals.

It was another sign of the times in Abdel Fattah Sisi’s Egypt — coming on a day that also saw a prominent human rights activist’s failed bid for release from prison, the killing of four police conscripts in the Sinai Peninsula by suspected Islamist militants and a bombing in the capital that claimed the life of a teenage girl and her mother.

Sisi, the former military chief who was sworn in three weeks ago as president, has presided over what has been shaping up as an apparent continuation of the harsh policies of the interim government that took power last July after elected President Mohamed Morsi, an Islamist, was overthrown by the military.

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The military’s supposedly miraculous medical device — a metal gizmo that has been described as resembling a kitchen hand mixer — drew wide ridicule when it was unveiled in February as the invention of an army general. Even a science advisor to the then-interim president, Adly Mansour, said the claim that it cures viruses had no scientific basis.