Baptist Faith Critical To Researcher That Might Have Cured Mississippi Child of HIV.

The Baptist Press has the Faith angle to a story that has got media exposure worldwide. See  Doctor in baby's HIV cure is rooted in faith & compassion  that profiles the University of Mississippi doctor /rresearcher involved.

She and her husband were in Africa when the virus was hitting hard. An interesting article that also includes this nugget.

......During Gay's time as a Baptist worker in the Horn of Africa, AIDS was becoming an epidemic there, her husband Paul told Baptist Press from the couple's home near Jackson, Miss.




"There [were] just huge numbers coming out of Uganda and some frightening numbers coming out of Kenya about HIV. There was great work going on in Uganda to try to get some kind of handle on the massive problem. A third of the adult population in Uganda was infected with HIV back at that time," Paul Gay said.



In Ethiopia, the government denied there was a problem, he said.



"Although we could not document it, the rumor was that [in Ethiopia] people who contracted HIV disappeared. None of the nongovernmental organizations, none of the international organizations that were there in the country, did testing because we were afraid that a diagnosis would be a death sentence, not from the disease but from whoever was responsible for these disappearances," Paul Gay said. "So it was a silent problem. It was only after the fall of the communist government to the coalition of Eritrean and Tegrean forces in 1991 that people in authority began to speak."



Even then, he said, the government realized faith would play a role in the control of the disease.



"Their leadership said ... there is a component in stopping HIV that the government is not equipped to handle. The NGOs, the religious organizations will have to provide that component," he said. "While they weren't saying it openly, they were saying it very clearly that they recognized that there was a faith component, a moral component in stemming the growth and the tide of this disease. So that was an amazing disclosure by the authorities."...............