The politics of Kemron 'Aids cure'

 
This a continuation of yesterday's Outlook report on Kenya's first Aids cure whose launch was a State function presided over by the President and attended by the entire Cabinet.

Dr Davy Koech still insists that he never at any time said that Kemron was a cure for Aids. Those attributing the claim, he says, have little idea on how interferons work.

Dr Koech attributes much of the criticism against his discovery on the larger scepticisms that had gripped the country in 1990s due to the political history of the nation.

The Kemri director wonders if Kemron was a con as currently held, then how comes people have continued to modify it in other forms, which they continue to sell.

To him, most of the critics of his product are those doctors who are concerned with vaccine development and those who concentrate on developing products that interfere with the replication of virus in the body.

These, according to Dr Koech, have little knowledge on interferon and their viability in modern disease management.

However, Dr Koech blames the saga on the politics of the day. According to him, there were two events that occurred in 1990, which though apparently unrelated, were closely intertwined. These were the agitation for multipartyism and the announcement that the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) had developed a drug for HIV/Aids. 

During this year, Kenyans were waking up to the reality of Aids as the most devastating scourge mankind had witnessed and a number of Kenyans had already lost or had a victim of the disease in their families. 

Thus, the news that there was now a cure for Aids could not have come at a better time. Unofficial sources have it that in a bid to dissipate their pent-up sexual urges that had been building up since the disease was shown to be transmitted heterosexually in Africa, many went on an unprecedented sex spree that was later to be manifested in very high Aids incidence in the country.

Apart from sending Kenyans into a sex frenzy, the news of the discovery of an Aids drug was to catapult some Kenyan researchers from virtual obscurity into medical heroes.

However, this heroism was shortlived and for Dr Koech, it was the beginning of a long journey in which politics, racism, peer jealousy and fortitude in the face of unrelenting adversity would define his scientific and private life. 

He said that the first phase involved the initial research into Kemron and the involvement of the Americans and the Japanese in this most scientifically and politically intriguing saga. 

The next phase is what he referred to as ''public and peer perception phase of Kemron" which begins from about December 7, 1989 to about February 10, 1990.

The third phase, which he referred to as the ''political interference phase" began on or about February 1990 to about July of the same year. This was followed by a peer criticism phase that lasted for about three to four years upto 1994.

"Then came the silent years' phase which lasted from 1994 to 1997/98 and finally the ''exploitation period'' from 1998 to the present," said Dr Koech.

Dr Koech says the study by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Kemron clinical trials was the first among many ways that were aimed at discrediting Kemron.

This was made worse by the scepticism and cynicism by a number of his Kenyan peers who claimed that Dr Koech and Prof Arthur Obel had been replacing patients in the study who died or got worse with new ones, a claim that they certainly could not authenticate. 

According to Dr Koech, this was a measure of how jealous some of his peers were- that they were more than willing to tear into a colleague without even bothering to look for the truth. This attitude trickled down to the public and within a short time, Kemron was viewed as the con of the decade. 

"The year 1990 was a tumultuous one for Kenya. The agitation for multi-partyism was at its peak and the Moi government was under siege," said a politician in the Moi government whom Outlook talked to recently.
 
"In the face of this serious onslaught, the Government was desperately looking for a decoy with which to divert the national attention. Then along came Kemron and Bingo! the Government had exactly what it was looking for," said the politician. 

This sums up how and why Kemron became so entangled with the political agenda of the day that in the ensuing melee, what was a scientific development was hijacked by politicians. 

Dr Koech said this may not be exactly how things played out but what happened was very close to this.

"Kemron was supposed to have been launched by the then Vice-President Prof George Saitoti. The launch was to have been performed at the Serena Hotel but this was not to be,'' Dr Koech told Outlook. 

Our source said that as soon as a group of politicians close to the President got wind of the information, they went into an overdrive in a bid to use Kemron to gain maximum political mileage. 

Said Dr Koech: "Without further reference to me and Obel, the politicians decided that it was too big an occasion to be performed at the Serena. 

"I was in Canada when an announcement was made by President Moi during Madaraka Day that Kemron would be launched soon.

As soon as I returned, the politicians had me summoned to State House where I was informed that the launch date had been changed and that the venue would be the Kenyatta International Conference Centre. It would be launched by the President himself." 

Dr Koech protested that Kemron was jointly developed and that the co-developers were also interested in attending the launch. 

"The launch date was then changed to August but the venue remained at the KICC," he said. 

In his Madaraka Day address, the President had this to say about Kemron: "This year alone we have reason to take pride in responsible manner in which our researchers and academicians have met the challenges of modern nation building. Our researchers at Kemri have given the world what is probably the effective treatment for the dreaded killer disease Aids. In a few months' time, it will be my greatest honour to officially launch Kemron, the Kenyan-developed anti-Aids drug, as commercially available, not just in Kenya, but elsewhere where millions of people face death as a result of this terrible disease."

 In Dr Koech's words, the politicians had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. 

"From then henceforth, Kemron became a political issue and politicians started making unfounded political statements without the slightest reference to us," said the Kemri director.

Following the brouhaha that greeted Kemron, Dr Koech chose to take a low profile and concentrate on what he knew best- the business of science. 

"From 1994 to about 1998, I decided to direct my energies to developing Kemri into a world-class institute. Apart from a few forays into research, this became my obsession.

"I can now look back with pride for playing the key role in developing the biggest medical research outfit in Africa and the ninth largest in the world, " said Dr Koech. 

He said that he developed Kemri virtually from scratch from around 1979. "Even my WHO re-entry grant of $72,000, which had been held in a suspense account, was nowhere to be found and I started the institute with a staff of not more than nine."

Today, Kemri has a whole range of modern facilities for health research and training. These include specialised research laboratories, among them a Biosafety (P3) level laboratory for handling highly infectious materials such as HIV and Ebola viruses, lecture rooms, an electron microscopy unit, a conference hall with a sitting capacity of 300 people, a 40 bed Ð model hospital, an animal house, herbal gardens and visiting scientists flats.

In terms of human resources, Kemri has one of the highest concentrations of staff in sub-Saharan Africa involved with health research on full time basis.

It has over 200 highly qualified and experienced health research scientists including microbiologists, clinicians, social scientists, pharmacists, epidemiologists, immunologists, virologists, bacteriologists and other specialised cadres.

This last period started quite some time ago though it became obvious from 1998 to the present.

"During the WHO trial on Kemron in early 1990s, patients in the trial were asked to take Kemron and swallow it with a lot of water," said Dr Koech. This, he said, was meant to show that the drug did not work since the route of administration of Kemron was sublingual. 

"While my peers were busy tearing me to pieces, the white scientists were busy perfecting Kemron," said Dr Koech as he referred to immunoplex, an alpha interferon that is now being sold in 14 African countries for hepatitis, HIV/Aids and as immune booster.

The question that many may now ask is whether with the advent of immunoplex, Dr Koech has finally been vindicated.

But Dr Koech sums it all up in his passing shot. "I could have taken lucrative appointments elsewhere and I was offered many. But I had a duty to serve my country and this called for a fair amount of sacrifice.

There is no hero without scars and Kemron is one such scar that I have carried in my scientific career. It is a scar I am proud of."

It is now upto Kenyans to judge Dr Davy Kiprotich Koech in the light of these hitherto unpublished facts. Is he the hero or the villain? Up to you Kenyans!