AS WITH SO MANY Washington City Paper articles, “Miracle Worker?” (The District Line, 9/3) confounds too many issues. Leaving aside the politics of the District government and the Abundant Life Clinic, please note that Immulin and ImmuViron are not, as your article states, “indistinguishable.” I have read Dr. Davy Koech’s early papers, published in a special supplement of The East African Medical Journal, Vol. 67, No. 7, July 1990. There are several crucial aspects of effective alpha interferon treatment that have not been reproduced in “official” studies. First, an alpha interferon is not an alpha interferon is not an alpha interferon. These treatments have distinct patents because each is a very specific regroupment of the same alpha interferons. Second, dosage is as important in alpha interferon-based treatments as the compound itself. Third, National Institutes of Health- and World Health Organization-sanctioned studies do not replicate the clinical regime prescribed by Dr. Koech. Please read the abstracts of these WHO- and NIH-sponsored tests before you compare them with work done at KEMRI.

I find it curious that you afford NIH and WHO such authority vis-à-vis this issue (NIH has held a real bleeding-edge position on breast cancer as well). I wonder too if Benjamin Wittes remembers that it was NIH that changed the name of this virus from HTLV3 to AIDS, after journalists from the African-American press began to question why a “totally new” virus would be called HTVL3, and demanded to know what HTLV1 and HTLV2 were. Since that far, far away time, armchair critics like Mr. Wittes have remained asleep at the wheel and failed to report that AIDS was developed in sheep (HTLV1) and in monkeys (HTLV2) before the virus surfaced in human populations (see Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Vol. 47, No. 3, 1972, pp. 275-438, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Vol. 73, April 1976, pp. 1014-1018).

Mount Ranier, Md.