Stardate 20030404.1542

(On Screen): It may be that nothing could have prevented a continent-wide tragedy in Africa once a disease such as AIDS appeared. But it's certain that the policies of some governments in the region have helped it become much worse sooner than it otherwise might have.

And I don't think the situation will be helped by quack medicine, either. There is no magic bullet for HIV, and there isn't going to be one. There won't be any easy, cheap, one-treatment cure for it. But that won't stop people from hoping that they've found one. For instance, having sex with a virgin won't cure you.

And being exposed to microwaves won't help, either.

A South African university will begin clinical trials to see if it can use microwaves to bombard the deadly HIV virus that causes AIDS and stop it from multiplying, a medical official said on Thursday.

Professor Barry Kistnasamy, head of the Nelson Mandela Medical School in Durban, said they planned to recruit about 360 HIV-positive patients within the next few weeks for the trials, which are due to be completed by the end of the year. The proposed treatment does not use drugs or vaccines, but uses electromagnetic technology similar to that found in cell phones, laptops and the microwave oven, Kistnasamy told Reuters.

"What we are testing is the hypothesis that electromagnetic frequency induces breaks in the viral genome ... (and) whether this effect will interfere with viral replication," Kistnasamy said.

Radiation at those frequencies is referred to as "non-ionizing", because individual photons don't have enough energy to break chemical bonds. For that you need to be up in the range of hard ultra-violet or X-rays or gamma rays.

The only way that microwaves can induce that kind of genetic damage is through the effects of heating, but that's non-specific and such heating (also known as "cooking") causes a lot of other changes. The only way that could happen would be extended exposure at multi-kilowatt power levels, and it would invariably be fatal.

And even if it were possible to specifically target viral nucleic acids this way without destroying proteins and lipids and saccharides and other essential biochemical components of our bodies, such a treatment would also damage the nucleic acids of the host's cells. That kind of damage even at low levels often causes cancer, which is why excessive exposure to hard UV or X-rays is not good for you; it could conceivably take only one damaged cell to eventually kill you.

What that kind of radiation usually does is to induce genetic copying errors during cell division. Altering the genetic material in non-reproducing cells and quiescent viral particles is a lot harder, and it's not at all obvious how viral genetic material could be specifically targeted without also damaging host cellular genetic material.

A person infected with HIV will have truly vast numbers of viruses in their tissue, and substantially all of them would have to be destroyed in order to cure the patient. A treatment which only destroys 99% of them would be useless. That would leave far more viruses than were introduced by the exposure which gave them the disease in the first place.

Any treatment capable of directly damaging more than 99% of the genetic material in HIV would unquestionably cause far too much damage to the chromosomes of the host's cells to be survived. That genetic material is in there because the cells need it to operate. So even a broad radiation treatment that actually did target genetic material, rather than just causing broad heating, would be useless.

This isn't a "hypothesis", this is quack medicine. It has no prospect whatever of working.