CAIRO, Egypt — The Egyptian army shocked the world’s medical establishment this week by announcing that it had created a cure for both AIDS and Hepatitis C. “I defeated AIDS with the grace of my God at the rate of 100%,” announced Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Abdel-Atti, head of the Cancer Treatment and Screening center. “And I defeated Hepatitis C.”
Abdel-Atti then proudly held aloft a slime-encrusted leech in one hand, and a copy of the Quran in the other. “The answers has been here all along,” he said. “We only needed to have the courage to find them.”
According to Dr. Ihsan Hanfy Hussein, a member of Abdel-Atti’s research team, the cure works by applying multiple leeches to a patient, and then drawing all of the blood out of the infected body. Then the disease is destroyed in the blood through a rigorous application of prayer before being returned to the patient’s body. Hussein calls his cure the “Complete Cure Device,” and he claims the entire procedure takes as little as 16 hours.
“I will take the AIDS from the patient and I will nourish the patient on the AIDS treatment. I will give it to him like a skewer of Kofta to nourish him,” said Abdel-Atti. “I will take it away from him as a disease and give it back to him in the form of a cure. This is the greatest form of scientific breakthrough.”
Reaction to the announcement was largely skeptical. “I want to be clear and explicit,” said Essam Heggy, the scientific advisor to the Egyptian President. “What has been said and published about the invention of the armed forces hurts the image of scientists and science in Egypt. We have been sticking leeches on people for decades without curing anything.”
“What has been said is not scientifically disciplined. There is nothing published, and there is nothing in medical conferences, and there is no single eminent professor around the project,” said Dr. Gamal Shiha, a leading Egyptian liver specialist who work centers on Hepatitis C. “Their entire cure hinges on training leeches to spit clean blood back into a body. You cannot train leeches to do anything. Trust me, we’ve tried.”
Abdel-Atti scoffed at the criticism. “If my critics do not wish to try my cure, that is their loss,” he said. “More leeches for me.”
