HIV patients turn to herbal juice as Venezuela crisis hits medicine

WHEN Jesus Rodriguez, 51, was diagnosed as HIV positive 13 years ago, the virus had nearly destroyed his immune system.

After spending over a year without the proper antiretroviral treatment to keeps the virus under control, Mr Rodriguez worries he could fall seriously unwell again.

As a last resort, he and hundreds of other HIV-positive patients without treatment in Venezuela have turned to drinking herbal juice made from the bay cedar leaf, a small tree found in forests and pastures of South America and the Caribbean.

“[We] saw information online about the bay cedar, a plant produced in the Brazilian forest, and Brazilian doctors used it to treat HIV,” Rodriguez said.

That Venezuelans with chronic conditions have turned to alternative medicines in lieu of recognised ones highlights the spectacular nature of the country’s collapse, formally a regional leader in healthcare.

Only four years after the beginning of an economic recession, pharmaceutical organisations estimate that 80 per cent of medicines are unavailable.

These days doctors and nurses must ask patients to bring their own syringes, gloves and medicines, hospitals spend weeks without running water, and Xray and radiation machines stay damaged for months. Nurses, making the equivalent of a dollar per week, have been on strike for over a month.

HIV attacks the immune system, leaving it susceptible to infections and cancers that healthy bodies could fend off using their natural defences.

While a cure doesn’t exist, antiretroviral therapy can often suppress ppress the virus to undetectable levels ls and allow patients to live a mostly stly normal, healthy life. But the moment a patient stops taking the therapy, the virus often comes roaring back.

The patients taking bay cedar now regularly scour local markets and parks for the tree’s leaf and bark, known locally as guasimo, which they use to blend into a pungent juice taken two or three times daily.

For each drink, Rodriguez cleans roughly 50 leaves and blends them with two litres of water. Although he hasn’t become sick, he has no evidence the concoction is controlling the virus.

“I’ve watched other friends die,” he says. “They picked up other infections.”

This year, all of the 85,000 HIV-positive patients enrolled in the government’s free medicine programme stopped receiving treatment.

Once a pioneer in HIV treatment, the country’s health ministry has become a “death factory”, a local activist says.