The Egyptian armed forces announce reaching a breakthrough in diagnosis and cure of Hepatitis C and HIV infections; presidential advisor tells local newspaper no scientific basis for devices Devices invented by the armed forces to diagnose and treat Hepatitis C and HIV should be tested by the international scientific community, the scientific advisor to Interim President Adly Mansour said. "The presidency affirms that scientific institutions should comply with international standards before announcing the results of their research," Said Heggy said in a statement published via Facebook on Sunday. On Tuesday, Al-Watan newspaper quoted Heggy saying the devices are unconvincing and appear to have no clear scientific basis. Heggy, who is currently on a visit to the US, told Al-Watan has papers proving the devices are ineffective and he will present them to the president when he returns to Egypt next week. On Saturday, the Egyptian armed forces announced in a press conference that its engineering department had invented devices to diagnosis and HIV and Hepatitis C: “The armed forces have achieved a scientific breakthrough by inventing devices to diagnose and treat Hepatitis C and HIV without taking a blood sample from the patient that gets immediate results at a low cost," said army spokesperson Colonel Ahmed Ali. Ali claimed the new devices can treat Hepatitis C at 10 percent of the cost of other methods with a success rate of more than 90 percent. The armed forces have also invented a device called C-Fast to diagnosis Hepatitis C, HIV, and H1N1 virus. According to Ali, it scored a 90 percent success rate in trials at an armed forces hospital. Physician and Major-General Ibrahim Abdel-Atti, the man behind the reported scientific breakthroughs, said the HIV and Hepatitis C treatments had a 100 percent success rate. "I started working on this project 22 years ago," Abdel-Atti said. "It started secretly in the military intelligence but now we are announcing it to the whole world." The devices to diagnose Hepatitis C and HIV using electromagnetic waves are called C-Fast and I-Fast, while the device to treat HIV and Hepatitis C as well psoriasis is called Complete Cure Device (CCD). The CC device will supposedly be used publicly in Egypt by June 2014. A short documentary played at the press conference on Saturday shows the C-Fast device being tested in Pakistan and India. The documentary also shows a patient who claims to have been totally cured of AIDS by the device. Major General Abdullah Taher, the head of the army's engineering authority, told Al-Ahram Arabic news website that the devices would not be exported abroad in order to protect them from "the mafia" of big pharmaceutical companies and nations that control the pharmaceutical industry. A medical source told Ahram Online that the diagnosis and infection control devices have been approved since 2012, but the treatment device is still being evaluated by the health ministry. In 2011, the defence ministry filed a patent with the World Intellectual Property Organization on the C-Fast device to diagnose Hepatitis C. Egypt continues to rank as one of the highest countries in the world Hepatitis C infections. The number of patients had reached 8 million in 2008, according to health ministry figures, or nearly 10 percent of the population. In some parts of Upper Egypt and the Nile Delta infection rates reach 20 percent. http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/95121.aspx
