Maduike Ezeibe has not cured AIDS
I mean, it feels ridiculous to me that I need to say this, but since this website is apparently full of bizarre AIDS-conspiracy theorists who think ‘the government’ will kill this man for publishing his quack science, I put together a few points to hopefully clear things up.
The claim that his treatment has cured AIDS is completely unfounded. In his June 2015 paper, Ezeibe writes:
Also, reduction of mean viral load of all the HIV/AIDS patients who participated in the clinical trial, from 18875.00 ± 17059.18 to 327.50 ± 226.84, is 98.26% reduction. Kaplan [27] reported that when treatments reduce loads of infectious agents by 95% or more, body immunity is able to eliminate what are left of the infections. What these results mean, is that the MSAMS cures HIV/AIDS, not just prolongation of lives of HIV-positive persons.
It’s embarrassing that I am using my fandom blog to tear this down, but that Kaplan paper cited is about parasitic worms. The fact that someone decided that a treatment threshold for parasitic worms could a) be applied to HIV and b) used to claim they found a cure should honestly discredit their entire body of work on the topic.
Anyone who has read a n y t h i n g about HIV in the past decade knows that that’s not how HIV fucking works. Every real antiretroviral treatment on the market today can achieve non-detectable levels of virus in a fraction of patients with good compliance, but whole reason HIV continues to be an issue today is that the virus hangs out inside your non-replicating dendritic cells or wherever and it fucking comes back when you stop treatment. To even think about claiming a cure for HIV, patients need to be off treatment and virus-free for YEARS. To date the only person to be really actually cured of HIV is the Berlin Patient, who was cured with a bone marrow transplant from a donor with HIV-resistant T-cells. Repeat after me: the only successful way to cure HIV is to kill off 100% of your immune cells and replace them with immune cells that HIV can’t infect.
So how did Ezeibe get away with making truly laughable claims in a scientific journal?
The paper is published in a trash journal. Scientific journals are rated by, among other metrics, their Impact Factor. This describes how many times an article in that journal will be cited in the future, telling you essentially how much that paper contributed to other people’s works. Scientists want their work to have impact. Top journals like Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine, etc. have Impact Factors in the 30s. These journals publish the most exciting, high-impact results that scientists across disciplines are interested in and they correspondingly have the most rigorous scientific requirements for accepting articles. A journal with Impact Factor of 2 to 4 might be a nice niche journal with decent rigor (like JIAS for example) but won’t be read by anyone outside that particular field of study. What, you may ask, is the Impact Factor for World Journal of AIDS, the journal where Ezeibe’s article is published?
ResearchGate lists their IF as 0. Is that the default for journals with no data? Seems so. WJA apparently doesn’t have an official IF score, (because Thompson Reuters doesn’t deem them to be even significant enough to score among the 70 Infectious Disease journals and 139 Immunology journals they scored in 2013) but they generously calculate their own alternative score to be less than one.
I honestly can’t critique his paper in more detail than this because his methods section is almost nonexistent. It’s possible that his nanoparticle therapy for HIV has promise, but it’s impossible to tell from this paper. For what is ostensibly a Phase I clinical trial for his “miracle drug,” any journal with any reputation at all to uphold is sending this submission back with request for MAJOR revisions, or more likely rejecting it outright.
Bottom line: no one is reading or citing WJA except by accident. The news outlets reporting on this paper need to fire their science correspondents.
HIV/AIDS is not a neglected disease. A lot of the reblogs of the original post seem to suggest that “no one will hear about this” because of the racism and homophobia that intersect with HIV/AIDS, and that Ezeibe is lacking funding to take his miracle cure into next stage trials because no one cares about HIV/AIDS anymore. Let me be clear: people with HIV face a million different types of stigma and discrimination, much of it connected to homophobia and racism, but LACK OF RESEARCH FUNDING IS NOT ONE OF THEM. HIV/AIDS receives $3 BILLION in annual funding from the NIH, the most of any single disease. This isn’t the 1980s anymore. Scientists fucking LOVE studying HIV. We literally know so much about this stupid virus that we are using it as a delivery system to bioengineer treatments for cancer.
There are loads of brilliant scientists working on a cure for HIV. There are loads of brilliant African scientists working on a cure for HIV. Maduike Ezeibe is not one of them.
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