The Deputy Director of Police Medical Services, Dr Godfred Asiamah, has said that any herbalist who claims to have a cure for HIV/AIDS is a fraudster and must be arrested for prosecution.
Dr Asiamah said it is outrageous for anybody including herbalists to claim to have found a cure for HIV/ADIS when that person knows very well that there is in fact no cure for the deadly disease. The medical officer said this at a two-day sensitization workshop at Dodowa for members of the Parliamentary Press corps, which was under the theme, "The Role of the Media in HIV/AIDS Prevention, Care and Treatment." His topic was, "Treatment of HIV/AIDS." The workshop was sponsored by the Ghana Aids Commission (GAC) and was attended by 36 Journalists.
According to Dr Asiamah, who is also the director in charge of the HIV/AIDS Programme at the Police Hospital, there is evidence that some herbalists have made false pretences of having found the cure for HIV/AIDS to ostensibly defraud their patients of various sums of money. He cited for instance that there was once a time when a herbalist approached him at the Police Hospital to claim that he had a cure for HIV/ADIS, following which he decided to release some patients to him; but he later found out that they were charged as high as ?2 million but the disease could not be cured.
"I repeat that all those herbalists who claim to have medicine to cure HIV/AIDS are fraudsters, they are cheats and must be arrested," he said. Dr Asamoah said it is an acceptable fact worldwide that HIV/AIDS cannot be cured and that whoever claims to have a cure for it would only be doing so to ostensibly take undue advantage of the situation of People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA).
But the Director-General of Ghana Aids Commission (GAC), Professor Sakyi Awuku Amoah, in a contribution said GAC does not dismiss outright claims by herbalists that they have cure for the deadly disease. He said the Commission has put in place a mechanism by which it subjects herbal reparations of herbalists to laboratory tests at the Noguchi Research Centre to establish the efficacy or otherwise of the preparations.
