Science, Politics, and the Presidential Aids ‘Cure’
Rebecca Cassidy (r.cassidy{at}ids.ac.uk) is a doctoral student at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex. Melissa Leach (m.leach@ids.ac.uk) is a Professorial Fellow at IDS, leader of its Knowledge, Technology and Society team and Director of the ESRC STEPS (Social, Technological, and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre. Our thanks are due to the Economic and Social Research Council, UK, as the administrative centre of a joint research council studentship, for their support of Rebecca Cassidy's doctoral research, elements of which have contributed to this article; to the DfID-funded Citizenship Development Research Centre, and to colleagues in The Gambia and the UK. However the opinions represented in this article are those of the authors alone, and not those of any of the people or institutions involved in funding or in any way supporting their research.
In early 2007 the President of a small African country announced his ‘cure’ for AIDS based on herbal, Islamic, and traditional medicine, resulting in the enrolment of several hundred people testing HIV-positive. This unleashed an ongoing yet remarkably silent controversy around AIDS treatment. The emergence of the presidential treatment can be understood in the political and scientific context of recent global AIDS funding and programming, and longstanding tensions between ‘foreign’ and local concerns with biomedicine and research. Framed in terms of appeals to tradition, ethnicity, religion, nation, and pan-Africanism, the President's programme appears diametrically opposed to mainstream scientific discourses. Yet in promoting and garnering support for his claims, this President has successfully co-opted and harnessed key elements of biomedical AIDS treatment discourse: in claims to identity as a doctor, and in deploying CD4 and viral load counts and personal testimonies as evidence of treatment efficacy. Uncertainty over how to interpret such evidence amongst vulnerable people living with HIV has encouraged many to volunteer. Such politics of science, along with the threatening political and security practices of this particular state, help explain why to date there has been so little overt criticism of the President's programme either within the country or internationally.