Military spokesmen struggled to explain that the weather had been bad and the aircraft were not well-equipped for mountain duties. But by then Egypt’s chattering classes were muttering about carelessness and incompetence.
Ever watchful of the army’s image, its Morale Affairs Department soon counter-attacked with a series of upbeat events, including the opening of an army-built bridge to ease Cairo traffic and the unveiling of a fancy new military medical college. The day culminated in a briefing, attended by top brass and Egypt’s army-appointed interim president, Adly Mansour, to reveal brilliant breakthroughs by military scientists.
The highlight of the televised show was the presentation of two new inventions. One, a handheld device much like a bomb detector, was said to be capable of finding, even through walls, humans infected with viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C, a chronic disease of the liver. The other invention, a blood filtering machine, was described as using electromagnetic pulses to destroy viral infections. It had a 100% success rate, claimed General Ibrahim Abdel Atti, the head of the army’s research team. “I have defeated AIDS and I have conquered hepatitis C,” he declared to loud applause.
Egypt’s army scientists would certainly have done a great favour to the world, as well as to their own people, were it true. Egypt has a relatively low rate of AIDS. But, largely as a result of a mismanaged government inoculation campaign in the 1980s to eradicate bilharzia, another chronic disease widespread in Egypt at the time, the country’s hepatitis C rate is four times higher than in any other country. At least 10% of its 90m people are thought to carry the disease, with an estimated half million new infections occurring every year. Current methods of treatment are expensive, risky and effective in only two-thirds of cases.
Moreover, said Mr Abdel Atti, the foundering economy will also benefit when the army opens centres offering the new technologies on June 30th. Egypt’s stricken tourism industry would receive an immense injection as millions of foreigners rushed to seek the new, exclusive treatment, he said. The general insisted, in subsequent interviews, that Egypt would jealously guard the technology from rapacious international pharmaceuticals companies. He himself, he declared, had turned down an offer of $2 billion for the technology from an unnamed foreign firm after it rejected his stipulation that it must “write that its inventor was Egyptian, Arab and Muslim”.
The story has unravelled amid a welter of protest from independent scientists and medical professionals that neither invention has been publicly tested, published, patented or peer-reviewed. A top scientific adviser to Egypt’s president declared the claims to be a “scandal” and a potential embarrassment to the Egyptian military. Investigations by local reporters appear to show that Mr Abdel Atti received his general’s rank not through military service, but as an honorary title. As recently as last year he appeared as a faith healer on religious satellite channels and had previously made an income as a private consultant in herbal medicine. An article in a Saudi newspaper in 2009 mentions him in connection with charges of sorcery.
Predictably, given Egypt’s highly polarised and envenomed political atmosphere, the affair generated controversy on Egyptian social media. Much commentary took the form of ridicule, particularly of Mr Abdel Atti bragging that he could now feed someone “AIDS kebab” and then cure the patient in a snap. Alluding to the reputed use of torture by Egyptian security services, one Twitter message parodied an army scientist reporting to his commander: “Yessir, we’ve tested the device. Straight away every patient confesses to feeling better!”
Others leapt to the army’s defence. Anyone who made fun of the invention should be denied the miracle cure, insisted one television announcer. On Facebook, another defender demanded that the president’s doubting scientific adviser should resign. All critics of the invention were, he said, complicit in a giant plot by multinational corporations and Zionists whose fiendish aim was to maintain a Western monopoly of medical know-how.
Should the inventions prove to be a hoax, as seems extremely likely, Egyptian sufferers of hepatitis C should not despair. The past few years have seen an encouraging breakthrough with the development of safe and highly effective—although still very expensive—drug to treat it. Nationalists among them may be encouraged, too, by the fact that the chief inventor of the new drugs happens to be Egyptian.
Currently based at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, Raymond Schinazi was born in Alexandria to a Jewish family that was subsequently expelled from Egypt during the rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s. Having won scholarships to study in Britain and then emigrated to America, Mr Schinazi in the 1980s and 90s pioneered much of the research that produced the most commonly used drugs to treat AIDS. With over 90 patents in his name, Mr Schinazi pocketed an estimated $440m from the sale in 2011 of Pharmasset, a start-up he founded to develop the promising hepatitis C cure, to Gilead, a California pharmaceuticals firm, for a cool $11 billion. Gilead’s new drug, called Sovaldi, was approved by the American authorities in December. A course of treatment currently costs a startling $84,000 but the price is likely to drop quickly, with poorer countries negotiating favourable deals to produce cheaper local versions. That does not seem too bitter a pill to swallow.
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http://www.economist.com/blogs/pomegranate/2014/02/egypts-generals