Attempts to cure and prevent HIV/AIDS in central Nigeria between 1997 and 2002: opening a way to a vaccine-based solution to the problem?

Like other sub-Saharan countries Nigeria is ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The author is a general surgeon with some training in Immunology and practises in central Nigeria. He conceived and developed a safe therapeutic HIV vaccine prepared from the blood of HIV-infected persons and applied the remedy to over 3500 such patients with their informed and written consent. He also developed a safe HIV preventive vaccine from the same source and applied it to himself and over 300 willing HIV antibody negative persons. This work reports his efforts and the findings so far even though some of the patients involved are still undergoing the therapy. The therapy has not affected, to any significant statistical level, either the overall weight gain in all the patients or the CD4+ count in those patients that were able to pay for the tests. The therapy also resulted in a maintained seroreversion to negative (normal) in some of the patients who, prior to therapy, had established seropositivity for HIV antibodies (20 patients), hepatitis C virus (HCV) antibodies (16 patients) and hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) (50 patients). Neither the therapeutic nor the preventive vaccine is associated with the production of anti-HIV antibodies. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.