Another Rath Aids patient dies
2005-10-31 23:23
Special Report
The South African government has announced a joint venture to reduce the cost of anti-retroviral drugs with a Swiss company.
Cape Town - Another of Aids dissident Dr Matthias Rath's patients has died.
Noxolo Ngalo, who tried to treat her disease with pills she
received from the Dr Rath Foundation, died on Sunday of liver failure.
As far as is known, she is Rath's second patient to have died recently.
Marietta Ndziba, one of his "model patients" also lost the battle against Aids.
Rath is campaigning to persuade people with Aids to give up their antiretroviral medication and use his vitamin treatment instead.
Before Ndziba died of Aids, Rath presented her at news conferences as an example of the success this treatment achieved against Aids.
Ngalo apparently got pills against Aids at a clinic in Du Noon, a township near Table View, said her mother, Angelina Skeyi, in an affidavit.
The affidavit states that Ngalo was diagnosed with HIV in January.
30 pills a day
In April and May, a middle-aged man came to her house and said she should go to a clinic in NY22, Guguletu for treatment.
It seems she was taken from the NY22 clinic to a clinic in Du Noon where a doctor gave her a brown bag containing pills.
She had to take 10 of them three times a day.
She was told it was a clinic of the Dr Rath Foundation.
She took the pills for a month and then began having neurological problems.
In June, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
In August, she went to a Rath clinic in NY22, where she got more pills.
Soon after that, her CD4 count was read at a clinic in NY1.
It was 15 - an indication of severe Aids.
On October 17, she began losing her memory and was admitted to the GF Jooste Hospital where she started showing signs of liver failure.
She died on Sunday.
MCC 'taking too long'
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) will use the affidavit in legal action against the Medicines Control Council (MCC), which the TAC claims is taking too long with an investigation against Rath.
Recently, the national and provincial health departments have been criticised because no action has been taken against Rath's activities.
After a TAC protest march to the provincial legislature on Friday, Western Cape MEC for health, Pierre Uys, said "the MCC is the appropriate authority" to investigate Rath.
- Die Burger