Arrest Rath, demands Achmat
2005-06-21 17:55
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 - The Treatment Action Campaign is going to make sure vitamin entrepreneur Matthias Rath gets arrested, said TAC chairperson Zackie Achmat on Tuesday.
He was speaking to supporters on the steps of the Cape High Court after a full Bench reserved judgment in the TAC's urgent application for an anti-defamation interdict against Rath.
The organisation is seeking to stop Rath and his Dr Rath Foundation from claiming the TAC is acting as a front for the pharmaceutical industry in promoting antiretroviral drugs for people with Aids, and that it is forcing the government to "spread death and disease".
Achmat told his supporters the TAC legal team had called Rath and the leaders of the Traditional Healers' Organisation (THO), which asked to join Rath as a respondent, liars.
"That is the truth. They are liars," he said.
"We are here to say to them, we are going to finish you off in terms of making sure that you don't experiment on people.
Claims experiments unauthorised
"We are going to make sure our government arrests Dr Rath. And if they don't, we will take them to court."
The TAC claims Rath's staff are conducting unauthorised pseudo-medical experiments on township dwellers.
Rath, who apparently has the tacit backing of Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, claims his vitamins can "control" and "reverse" Aids, an assertion dismissed by mainstream medical experts.
The Medicines Control Council is investigating his activities.
Earlier, in court, TAC advocate Geoff Budlender dismissed arguments by lawyers for Rath and the THO that TAC did not have a reputation worth protecting.
This was a "most astonishing proposition", he said.
The organisation had received national and international awards for work that was admirable and important for the public good.
He rejected the argument that the TAC, which several years ago labelled Tshabalala-Msimang a murderer in its campaign for a rollout of ARVs, needed "clean hands" if it sought the protection of the court.
TAC 'insists on independence'
Budlender said Rath and the THO had produced no evidence, as opposed to theories or supposition, that the TAC was funded by pharmaceutical companies or their agents.
On the contrary, eight witnesses had proved in affidavits that since its inception in 1998 the TAC had insisted on political and financial independence from the industry.
Reserving judgment, Judge Siraj Desai said it would take "several weeks" for him and his two colleagues to formulate their findings.
- SAPA