Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2005. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - November 29, 2005
The Treatment Action Campaign and the South African Medical Association said Tuesday that Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang - known for espousing garlic and olive oil instead of antiretroviral drugs for people with HIV - has failed to protect public health by allowing Matthias Rath to push vitamin compounds as an alternative to antiretroviral therapy.
Leaders of the two organizations - flanked by representatives of the trade union movement and communist party - said at a press conference they were taking unprecedented joint legal action because they felt all other avenues had been exhausted.
"The Rath Foundation is sowing dissent and confusion among people and making our job of looking after patients with HIV very, very difficult," said the medical association's Mark Sonderup.
"Matthias Rath has come here and is using poor black people as guinea pigs," said Treatment Action Campaign general secretary Sipho Mthati. "We are asking our president and our political leaders to put an end to this now."
Rath, who is active in the poor townships of the Western Cape, has been criticized by the World Health Organization and the scientific establishment for saying that his supplements cure AIDS and that antiretroviral medicines are toxic.
Ralf Langner, spokesman for the Rath Foundation, said the new lawsuit was part of a long-running campaign by multinational drug companies to use fronts to sell antiretrovirals and prolong the AIDS crisis in the name of profit.
"Never before has a pharmaceutical cartel and its stakeholder shown so openly that they are willing to suppress any lifesaving information on alternatives to pharmaceutical drugs," he said in a telephone interview.
"This cartel is attacking a whole country for trying to protect its people's lives naturally," he said.
South Africa has an estimated 6.3 million of its 47 million population infected with HIV - the highest total in the world.
The South African Health Ministry says there is no evidence that Rath's activities have harmed public health. The Medicines Control Council has been investigating the Rath Foundation but so far has not taken any action against it.
A group of 199 medical practitioners recently signed an open letter to health authorities in the Western Cape pleading for action. They said that thanks to Rath's foundation, "our patients are being inundated with propaganda encouraging them to stop lifesaving medicine."
The Treatment Action Campaign said at least five of Rath's patients recently died after they heeded his advice and shunned antiretroviral therapy. They included Marietta Ndziba, who appeared at a Rath press conference in June.
Diagnosed as HIV positive in 1999, Ndziba said that she could not talk or walk until she started taking Rath's compounds.
"After five days, something started to change in my body," the 29-year-old woman told journalists in June. "Now I can talk, speak and am not afraid of anything. I am so proud."
The Treatment Action Campaign said Ndziba died in October. Langner of the Rath Foundation confirmed that she was dead but said she was only one of hundreds of people taking the compounds and that the fatality rate among people on antiretrovirals was higher.
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