Praying for health and death

The newly appointed health minister, Dr Christine Ondoa Dradidi, since her appointment has promoted the claim advanced by Oyet’s Life Line Ministries, that HIV/AIDS can be cured through prayer. She told The Observer that prayer heals HIV/AIDS, and that she knows three people who were once positive but turned negative after prayer for deliverance.

“I am sure and I have evidence that someone who was positive turned negative after prayers,” Ondoa told The Observer , promising to ask colleagues in Arua hospital, where she once worked, to find the relevant documentation. She spoke of her time as a doctor in West Nile when she handled cases of people who claimed to be negative after ARV treatment and prayers “While there [West Nile], we did thorough testing and saw all documentation of three people who were once positive. We tested them in different laboratories and the results were negative,” .

Dr. Christine Ondoa as the new head of Uganda’s Ministry of Health. The position will give Ondoa authority over a significant portion of Uganda’s foreign HIV/AIDS mitigation funding, which in the year 2010 included over $270 million dollars from the United States. Along with her role as a medical professional, Christine Ondoa also serves as pastor in the Life Line Ministries of apostle Julius Peter Oyet, one of the most powerful clerics leading Uganda’s ongoing crusade against gay rights. Apostle Julius Oyet has stated that “even animals are wiser than homosexuals”, forthrightly declared that homosexuality should be a capital crime, and claimed to have co-authored the internationally condemned, so-called “kill the gays” bill–submitted in 2009 by a member of Oyet’s elite “College of Prayer” group in Parliament.