British nutrition guru Patrick Holford, currently touring South Africa, says he has no links to the Dr Rath Health Foundation and does not advise people to stop taking antiretrovirals (ARVs).
He has also denied news reports that, he said, implied he had been saying vitamin C was more effective in treating Aids than the ARV AZT.
”This is not true,” he said in a statement issued at the weekend. ”I have never made this claim. What I have said in the latest edition of my book, The New Optimum Nutrition Bible … is that ‘AZT, the first prescribable anti-HIV drug, is potentially harmful and proving less effective than vitamin C’.”
It was reported last week that the laboratory study on which Holford based this sentence was conducted by Dr Raxit Jariwalla, whom the Dr Rath Health Foundation lists as one of its researchers and who was one of the key speakers at a foundation conference in South Africa just more than a year ago.
Holford said in his statement that Jariwalla’s ”robust and impeccably conducted research”, published in leading, peer-reviewed journals, warranted following up with trials with human volunteers.
”The real crime here is that no full-scale human trials have been funded on vitamin C to follow up Jariwalla’s important finding, probably because it is non-patentable and hence not profitable,” Holford said.
”Until such a trial is done we will not know to what extent vitamin C can act as an antiretroviral agent … It does not mean that people should stop taking AZT and I am not advocating this.”
He said Jariwalla’s original research was undertaken at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in 1990, ”long before the existence of the Rath foundation”.
Holford said he had no association ”whatsoever” with the foundation and had never met or spoken with its founder, Dr Matthias Rath — who, coincidentally, also trained under Pauling.
He said that in addition to Jariwalla’s research, clinical studies by other researchers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals had documented beneficial effects of vitamin C and other nutrients in HIV-infected persons.
In one experiment with a small subgroup of advanced Aids patients, administration of high-dose vitamin C and N-acetyl-cysteine was linked to reduced HIV viral load and improved immune-cell count.
Rath and his foundation have been criticised by doctors and Aids activists for advocating that people with Aids take his commercially prepared vitamins rather than ”toxic” ARVs.
He has been tacitly backed by Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
Rath is suing the Democratic Alliance over a claim that he is a ”charlatan”, after himself losing a defamation action brought by the Treatment Action Campaign, which he claimed was a front for pharmaceutical companies. — Sapa