The Egyptian Army is now earning worldwide criticism after it claimed that it has found the cure to AIDS and Hepatitis C.
The pronouncement was made by Maj. Gen. Taher Abdullah, the head of the Engineering Agency in the Armed Forces during a televised presentation made over the Egyptian State Television, specially for military chief Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who toppled Mohammed Morsi in July, and who is also expected to run for president.
The devices, called C-Fast and I-Fast, supposedly uses electromagnetic waves to diagnose HIV and Hepatitis C. The device to treat both HIV and Hepatitis C is called the Complete Cure Device, and will supposedly be used publicly in Egypt starting in June 2014. Military spokesman Colonel Ahmed Mohammad Ali said on his official Facebook page that a patent has been filed for the devices under the name of the Armed Forces Engineering Agency in 2011.
Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Abdel-Atti, head of the Cancer Treatment and Screening Center, explained that the "Complete Cure Device" works by drawing blood from the patient. Then it breaks down the disease and returns the purified blood back into the patient's body. Sixteen hours is all it supposedly takes for the device to cure a patient completely, and the method has a 100 percent success rate.
"I will take the AIDS from the patient and I will nourish the patient on the AIDS treatment," 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."
"We precisely followed the patients every three months. The results were astonishing, to the extent that we had to repeat the lab works in different locations just to be sure," said Dr. Nadia Ragab, Chief of the Central Unit for Development and Research.
Egypt's presidential adviser, however, has declared the announcement as a "scientific scandal" for his country. Essam Heggy said the devices don't appear to have any clear scientific basis. He mentioned that he was not consulted about the announcement, and was therefore surprised when it came. El-Sisi, for whom the device was unveiled, was just as surprised, according to Heggy.
It also shocked Dr. Gamal Shiha, who is a leading liver specialist and is involved with the team that was currently investigating a military-developed device that can detect Hepatitis C without drawing any blood from the patient. He said that the announcement was hastily made, because only C-Fast underwent thorough testing. It was tested on over 2,000 patients with a high success rate. However, he also said that it was not true that the devices can detect AIDS and implement a cure.
"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 Shiha. "Nothing scientifically relevant has been said."
Mashable has photos of the "miraculous" device, and said that C-Fast looks too much like a bomb detector called ADE 651, which was sold to Iraq and did not even work.
C-Fast looks a lot like the handle of a blender with a telescoping metal antenna attached to it, and supposedly detects which patients are infected. The antenna supposedly swings around and follows an infected person.
Egypt is plagued by Hepatitis C, and currently has one of the highest rates of Hepatitis C cases in the world, with 8 million infected citizens in 2008 alone. This accounted for nearly 10 percent of the country's entire population.
