An immediate investigation by the Department of Health and the Medicines Control Council into the activities of anti-Aids-drug lobbyist Matthias Rath in the Western Cape township of Khayelitsha is needed, says the University of the Witwatersrand.
The university’s vice-chancellor, Professor Loyiso Nongxa, said in a statement issued on Thursday morning that he wants an investigation into the Dr Rath Health Foundation to ensure that “vulnerable people are not exploited in the name of research”.
The statement also said that the biggest concern is reports from media and statements from international organisations such as Médécins sans Frontières about “clinical trials” of micronutrients among people living with HIV/Aids in Khayelitsha in Cape Town.
“The trials have not been approved by any research ethics committee, nor have they been subjected to scientific scrutiny. The medications being used have not been approved for this use by the Medicines Control Council. Reportedly, people being ‘enrolled’ on this trial are not given adequate and accurate information about the alternative medication and are thus not able to give informed consent.”
Dr Wendy Orr, director of the university’s office for transformation and employment equity, told the Mail & Guardian Online “there is an investigation needed in Khayelitsha”.
“The Health Department and the Medicines Control Council need to go into Khayelitsha and do what the journalists did. They have to establish what Rath is doing,” Orr said.
“If the media are right and the all the allegations are true, he [Rath] should be prosecuted. What he does is actually against the law.”
Orr says reports from different health organisations state that “on behalf of the Rath foundation, people go into the township to recruit HIV-positive people to enrol in the trial. For every person they can stop taking anti-retrovirals and start taking micronutrients, they get R100.”
The university supports all ethical, scientifically valid research into alternative ways of managing HIV/Aids.
“Anti-retrovirals are expensive, so we do support alternatives,” says Orr.
Department of Health spokesperson Solly Mabothe told the M&G Online on Thursday that an investigation into Rath’s activities is “under way”. He could not comment further.
The M&G Online reported in August this year that all future advertising by the Dr Rath Health Foundation and its allied organisations have to be vetted by the Association of Communications and Advertising, according to an Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruling.
This was because foundation did not obey the directorate’s orders to refrain from saying that anti-retroviral drugs used by HIV/Aids patients are toxic and only vitamins will cure them.
Rath has been lobbying in South Africa against the use of anti-retroviral medicines, saying that the drugs are toxic and that people calling for greater access to them are the paid lackeys of pharmaceutical companies.
He maintains that HIV-positive people should instead take vitamins, which he claims can also cure cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
“The respondent’s advertisements are reckless in the extreme, considering that they make unsubstantiated claims on a matter affecting hundreds of thousands of people living with HIV/Aids,” said the ASA ruling.
“The respondent’s marketing campaign misleads and causes great confusion among people facing a life-threatening epidemic, creating a volatile atmosphere of misinformation and incorrect medical decisions.”
Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said in a written reply to question in Parliament in June that she will “only distance myself from Dr Rath if it can be demonstrated that the vitamin supplements that he is prescribing are poisonous for people infected with HIV”.