The Journal
HIV
The Plant
Introduction
We cannot afford to forget the wisdom in the age-old adage that those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The oldest book with the widest circulation is the Bible and we read in Genesis chapter 3:17, after Adam and Eve had disobeyed God and eaten of the forbidden fruit and I quote, “Accursed be the soil because of you. With suffering shall you get your food out of it every day of your life. It shall yield you brambles and thistles, and you shall eat wild plants. For dust, you are and you shall return”.
Then in Genesis 3:22, God said “see, the man has become like us, with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out next and pick from the tree of life also, and then eat some and live forever, so God expelled him from the Garden of Eden.”
Here we have the first hint from the creator Himself that the secret of healing or control of disease and ill health is in plants as the “tree of life.” The plants’ healing power is in foods, vegetables, and fruits. The hand of God dispersed the healing power of the tree of life. Again, if we dig down into history we find evidence for this natural healing power in plants. The scurvy epidemic that devastated sailors in the 15th – 18th century, are good evidence for this, as we shall see later on.
During the 20th century, we have experienced many types of disease epidemics that have included both bacterial and viral organisms. Most of us remember reading about the havoc created by diseases like smallpox, cholera, polio, plague and many others, but none can compare with HIV in complexity and extent of a devastation.
It is now seventeen years since the Human Immune Deficiency Virus appeared on the scene. Ever since this virus was identified as the cause of AIDS, the panic-stricken scientific community of every country in the western world convinced their respective governments to mount a determined research effort that was meant to bring about a rapid solution to the problem. The wealthy nations like the USA, UK, France and Germany voted billions of dollars for a global research effort comparable only to the race to the moon, in budget size. This budget, which dwarfed all efforts in the Third World, made us all stand idle hoping that their efforts would soon bring us the answer.
The returns on this investment, the world over, have been uniformly dismal and discouraging. Up to date we have had many claims of treatment breakthroughs from various parts of the world, but unfortunately none of them has materialised to alleviate the mood of despair in the world today.
I had to try and understand why some people go down with AIDS sooner than others. I formed a working theory, which was that the HIV exploits a weakness in the body without which the individual does not develop AIDS despite having the virus that causes it. I developed this theory because I observed that the herpes simplex virus only causes blisters after an individual has had some other illness like malaria or any other febrile illness. I postulated that since the HIV is in the same class of retroviruses as the herpes simplex, then the two could be behaving in a similar manner. The two manifest themselves at an opportune time when the immune system of the individual has been so weakened by some other factors, rendering it incapable of keeping them suppressed. It would, therefore,follow that if one could boost the victim’s immunity to normal, then AIDS, like herpes simplex, would not develop. That is why HIV has a long incubation period waiting for such opportunity.
Alternatively, if the factors that bring about the reduction in immunity could be prevented or removed then the problem of AIDS and herpes could not arise.