CAPE TOWN - A new row in South Africa is pitting the influential AIDS lobby group pushing President Thabo Mbeki's government to provide more free anti-retroviral drugs against a vitamins salesman who says ARVs are poison.
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which resorted to legal action to force the government to roll out ARVs nearly two years ago, went to court on Friday to try to win an order against German-born Matthias Rath, who claims that vitamins can reverse the course of AIDS.
"We are asking the court to grant us a temporary interdict which will stop Doctor Rath from making defamatory comments about us," said TAC spokesman Nathan Geffen.
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.
"These ARV drugs severely damage all cells in the body - including white blood cells -- thereby not improving but rather worsening immune deficiencies and expanding the AIDS epidemic," said Rath in an advertisement published in The New York Times this week.
Several hundred traditional healers turned up at the Cape high court to show support for Rath, waving banners that read "Dr Rath for natural health". Police were deployed to keep the traditional healthers and TAC supporters apart.
On Wednesday, the United Nations' paramount health agencies launched a joint attack. The World Health Organisation (WHO), UN Children's Fund (Unicef) and UNAIDS said Rath's advertisements were misleading and potentially dangerous.
"These advertisements, placed in the international press, are wrong and misleading," a joint statement by the UN agencies said, adding they were "extremely concerned" they had been quoted out of context by Rath to bolster his claims: "Misrepresentations of this sort are both dangerous and unhelpful."
Vitamins and nutritional supplements alone cannot substitute for a balanced diet or replace treatment, the UN agencies said.
"In countries where it is widely available, antiretroviral therapy has turned AIDS from a 'death sentence' into a chronic but manageable disease," they said.
The Rath Foundation, which promotes the use of a "nutrient combination" consisting of vitamins, amino acids, minerals and polyphenol extracts from green tea, has set up shop in Cape Town townships.
The debate over ARVs has also revived controversy around Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang for stressing the negative side-effects of the "cocktail therapies" and insisting that good nutrition -- including her much-touted diet of raw garlic, lemon, olive oil and beetroot -- is key to combating HIV.
Under pressure to disassociate herself from Rath, Tshabalala-Msimang earlier this month said she had never endorsed the self-professed health guru while reiterating her reservations about the use of ARVs.
"It is absolutely critical that our people know about the side-effects, particularly because these are new medicines and not much is known about them," said the health minister.
TAC chairman Zachie Achmat called for the resignation of the health minister, telling supporters outside the Cape high court that "our government needs to decide whether to have a decent health minister or not...Manto must go."
The health department and the Medicines Control Council however said this week that they were investigating Rath, who also has offices in the United States and Europe.
South Africa has the world's highest AIDS caseload, with 5.3 million people, or an estimated one out of five adults living with HIV and AIDS, according to UN figures.
At least 42,000 South Africans are receiving ARVs under the government's rollout program launched in 2003. TAC is urging the government to speed up the ARV rollout to make them available to 200,000 people by 2006.
South Africa's largest trade union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Union (COSATU), this week waded into the debate, saying that Rath was spreading lies about HIV.

05/13/2005 13:04 GMT