CAPE TOWN, Nov 29 (AFP) - South Africa's most influential AIDS lobby group Tuesday said it had sued the government for failing to prevent a controversial German vitamins distributor from selling unregistered 'wonder cure' drugs here.
"We are launching the court action and demand that the health minister should stop Matthias Rath's (a German distributor) illegal activities which include conducting illegal clinical trials," said Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) secretary general Sipho Mthathi.
The AIDS lobby group on Monday filed papers in the Cape High Court his also taking Rath, the Medicines Control Council and the provincial government of the Western Cape region.
Rath, who heads his own Rath Foundation, has accused the TAC of being a front for drug companies that he claims are responsible for an "AIDS genocide" through the sale of ARVs.
The TAC accuses Rath and a foundation which bears his name of selling and distributing unregistered medicines "which place at risk the health and lives of people with AIDS," according to papers before the High Court.
"They make false and unauthorised statements that their medicines are effective in treating or preventing AIDS ... they conduct unauthorised and unethical clinical trials on people with AIDS," said TAC in its application.
The Rath Foundation has been promoting and distributing vitamin supplements around Cape Town townships and advocates that anti-retroviral drugs were ineffective and poisonous.
"The government authorities are under a duty to take reasonable and effective steps to stop the unlawful activies of the Rath respondents," said the TAC, who are still awaiting a court date for the hearing.
The South African Medical Association (SAMA), a representative body of doctors supporting the TAC, say the damage caused by the Rath Foundation through confusion over which drugs were effective was huge.
"Reversing some of the confusion will be a monumental task," said SAMA's Dennis White at the media briefing, adding that doctors were seeing more patients who were confused about the treatment to take.
South Africa is one of the countries the worst affected by the AIDS pandemic with six million people infected with the virus while only 80,000 HIV positive patients are receiving retroviral drugs (ARVs), the most effective proven treatment of the virus, under a government programme launched in 2003.
The UN's annual report on the global AIDS crisis, released last week, said that at least 85 percent of South Africans in need of ARVs, were not yet receiving them by mid-2005.
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