peripheries

Quackery, and the Internet, kill

August 24th, 2008 | by User Image

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In an editorial for Health-e Anso Thom reminds us how People Living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) are easy preys for AIDS-revisionists and charlatans who make money on the back of the defenceless and vulnerable.

Thom reports on how South African national health minister Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has been prompt to take off of the selves potentially unsafe conventional medicines but also how she was and still is less prompt to act when it comes to “natural remedies” promoted by charlatans such as Dr Rath and his Health Foundations or Zeblon Gwala, a former truck driver making a stack of money selling a brown liquid called Ubhejane (Zulu for Rhinoceros).

Back in 2005 desperately ill people living with HIV were convinced to attend clinics were they were given a cocktails of vitamins that would boost their immune system and make them healthy again. It was soon revealed that Dr Rath was conducting an illegal clinical trial and that people were dying in his hand.

“Families spoke of mothers and sisters who died at home, their bodies wracked with diarrhea and thrush. But they refused to return to the state clinics as they had been told by the distributors of these tablets that they should rather attend the clinics being run under the banner of the Rath Foundation.”

Then Manto was not that quick to take action.

“For years the German vitamin seller was allowed to spread his vitamin and anti-ARV gospel mainly in Khayelitsha and Gugulethu and was in the process of going national when civil society, in the form of the Treatment Action Campaign, and the South African Medical Association, used the courts to put an end to his crusade.”

Last June, Judge Dumisani Zondi interdicted Rath, his foundation, his former employee David Rasnick (biochemist, AIDS denialist and former advisor to South African President Thabo Mbeki) and employee Alexandra Niewicki from conducting any further unauthorized clinical trials in South Africa, as well as selling their vitmain cocktail as a treatment for HIV.

But Rath is not the only one enjoying “a culture of impunity allowing charlatans like Matthias Rath to deceive vulnerable people into taking snake oils,” has put by Nathan Geffen of the Treatment Action Campaign, the main drivers behind the court action. Many are promoting “miracle cures” for a score of diseases in complete impunity, sometimes with the implicit support of government officials. With the development of the Internet miracles potion sellers have found a new platform to promote and sell their “remedies” and little can be done to warm or protect vulnerable people from the danger of these untested drugs.

It seems every disease has an online miracle cure from breast cancer and “vitamine B17” (there is no such thing as B17, and the compound behind the claim has been proved scientifically toxic) to AIDS that can be cured by vitamins, garlic, beetroot, lemon, herbs concoctions, and recently a “Miracle Mineral Solution” that also “cure” malaria (No link will be provided to these).

There is little one can do to stop charlatans promoting snake oil and beetroot as medical remedies online or in public. The phenomenon is not new and as pointed out by Thom, “While [the South African government] may not have the legislative framework to take such steps, they certainly have not shown any political will to even try to come to grips with this minefield” with tragic results. The issue is particularly sensitive in a country like South Africa where medical research is often conducted by “the White West” and where demands to act are often perceived as “colonialists”.

Few scientists and public figures are ready to engage in a time consuming and mentally demanding fight against quackery. Too often, scientists think that simply dismissing denialist’s claims will be enough to re-assure the public. Past exemples of the MMR vaccines, foot and mouth disease and the bird flu should tell them better.

At the dawn of the 21st century, obscurantism is looming more than ever.