Source: THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, March 25, 1991
Age-old practices spread lethal modern virus
By Lorerta Tofani, Inquirer Staff Writer
MACHAKOS, Kenya — The balding medicine man sharpened his pocketknife with another knife, filling his small rural office with the screech of metal. Then, dipping the smaller blade into a jar of herbs, he made two half-inch incisions on his patient’s neck, four on each arm. Blood oozed.
“Eeeh,” gasped the patient, a 19-year-old woman, who had come in because of a stomachache.
“Just relax,” said the medicine man. Daniel Musyoki, pressing herbs into the oozing cuts.
The incisions are the traditional African version of injections, a way to get healing herbs into a patient’s body. But a number of Musyoki’s patients carry the AIDS virus. And he refuses to sterilize his knife between patients. And so this 70-year-old-medicine man’s knife — his tool for healing — has become an instrument of death.
According to Kenya’s Ministry of Health, the knives of medicine men such as Musyokl are responsible for spreading blood, and thus the AIDS virus, from patient to patient.
There are 40,000 medicine men, or herbalists, in Kenya, and about 70 percent of the country’s citizens seek their help at some time. For centuries, these traditional healers have cut herbs into their patients’ skin, using the same knife or hook on every patient. The instrument is believed to have its own healing powers and is passed down from generation to generation of healers.
The Ministry of Health has told many of these traditional healers, including Musyoki, that in order to prevent the spread of AIDS they must boil their knives between patients, or sterilize them in an open flame.
Few listen.
“My herbs sterilize my knife,” insisted Musyoki. “Even my grandfather used herbs to sterilize his knife.”
Across the dirt road from Musyoki’s office, Mutinda Nzuki, 83, treats sick people — some of them with AIDS — in the bedroom of his dirt-floor hut. Nzuki, too, has been told that unsterilized knives spread the virus. But he simply wipes the blade with a rag between patients.
“I don’t have much respect for the Ministry of Health’s recommendations,“ Nzuki said. “My ancestors didn’t say I must sterilize my knife. But if I had inherited my practice from the Ministry of Health, I would have done as it says.”
Therein lies an essential fact about the spread of the AIDS virus in Kenya, and indeed in Africa: When it comes to a choice between tradition and science, tradition often wins out.
See also: How Semmelweis saved pregnant women, Barry Marshall’s self-induced ulcer, and “The Black Plague, and a political cautionary tale.”