Cures for AIDS: Africa

I tend to be favorably disposed to the cultural practices of other peoples, partly because I believe that cultural diversity serves a similar function to diversity of the gene pool -- but these horrific techniques for "curing" AIDS show the dangers of paranoid magical thinking in the "pre" phase of what Ken Wilber calls the "pre/trans fallacy". I had known for some time about the African notion that (a man) sleeping with a virgin (girl) would be cured of AIDS thereby, but the cure by potion made from a virgin boy's penis was unknown to me until I read about it today. The story of the two boys has a happy resolution, but it is the symbolic power of virginity and the way it is deployed in "myths" of purification that, as a poet and lover of the symbolic, horrify me.