Health department is running Rath investigation
Living with AIDS #235
KHOPOTSO: ‘The investigators are appointed by the Director-General of the Department of Health as law enforcement officers and inspectors, not the MCC. The MCC does not have its own investigators. The MCC makes a ruling based on the findings of the law enforcement agency. The MCC does not have the power to investigate in terms of the Medicines and Related Substances Act. The MCC cannot conduct an investigation’.
Those were the words of Dr Humphrey Zokufa, Registrar of the Medicines Control Council, in a telephone conversation he did not want recorded. Dr Zokufa was told that he would be quoted for purposes of this report.
However, the Department of Health’s Director-General Thami Mseleku, has said that two processes of investigation into Dr Rath’s affairs are underway – one by his department’s law enforcement agency and the other by the MCC.
THAMI MSELEKU: There’s a difference between the MCC and the Department of Health. The MCC investigates particular issues’¦ If you want to register a medicine, then, you actually go and register that medicine with the MCC. If somebody comes in and says that ‘MCC there’s somebody who is actually acting outside your registration process,’ then, the MCC will investigate that. The law enforcement agency actually enforces that law. In other words, it enforces the findings of the MCC on anything. So, if the MCC has found that this medicine cannot actually be put in South Africa for this reason and that reason, the law enforcement agency will go in and say ‘are you actually doing what the MCC has approved or not?’ In other words, are you breaking the law?
KHOPOTSO: When asked if there were two processes, as referred to by Mseleku whereby the MCC would investigate one aspect and the law enforcement unit, another, Dr Zokufa of the MCC had a simple answer: ‘No’.
This is all rather confusing. But what seems clear is that the only actual investigation into the Rath Foundation is that being conducted by Health Department’s law enforcement unit.
This means that the MCC is not conducting its own investigation into the Rath Foundation, but is rather relying on information being gathered by the Department of Health. At the same time, the Rath Foundation is expanding its operations. It has recently moved into the Eastern Cape and reopened its old centre in Hout Bay, in Cape Town.
Meanwhile, the Health Department appears to already have decided to let the foundation off the hook, based on the law enforcement unit’s preliminary findings. According to Director-General Thami Mseleku:
THAMI MSELEKU: We have a report from our law enforcement people, which has just been submitted to us as a preliminary report and we are finalising the last report’¦ There had been allegations that Dr Rath was actually using medicine that was not registered in South Africa. And the law enforcement agency says, in accordance with what was actually pronounced by the Department of Health before about the matter of the complementarity of Dr Rath’s vitamins, there hasn’t been anything that Dr Rath has done wrong with regard to that.
KHOPOTSO: It remains to be seen whether the MCC comes to a different conclusion. However, the MCC has admitted that it has not registered the multivitamins used by Dr Rath in his trial. In addition, the Rath Foundation’s ‘clinical pilot study’ was refused ethical approval by the University of Limpopo’s faculty of medicine, Medunsa campus. One of the reasons was that Rath’s ‘cellular medicine’ had not been registered by the MCC.
Dr Mark Sonderup, the South African Medical Association’s spokesperson on HIV and AIDS, is concerned about these developments.
Dr MARK SONDERUP: We are astonished that this has not been acted on yet by the authorities. There clearly has to be some sort of tacit endorsement of what he is doing by the authorities and the powers that be, otherwise this would not be allowed to continue in any sane society.
KHOPOTSO: This concern is echoed Dr Wendy Orr, Director of the Transformation and Employment Equity project at Wits University.
Dr WENDY ORR: It’s very worrying. I mean, the Minister isn’t even silent. In fact, she’s come out in support of Dr Rath, which is even more troubling.
KHOPOTSO: Meanwhile, the Treatment Action Campaign is preparing to take the MCC and the Health Department to court over its inaction on the Rath Foundation.
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