Germany also told Rath to stop adverts
May 17, 2005 Edition 1
Di Caelers
Self-proclaimed vitamin guru Matthias Rath has been ordered by a Berlin court to stop advertising in Germany that his vitamins could cure cancer - or face a €250 000 fine.
The finding by the German court in January centres on the death of a nine-year-old German boy, Dominik Feld, who died allegedly after being taken off cancer treatment and put on Rath's
vitamins.
Rath is currently up against the Aids activist group the Treatment Action Campaign in the Cape High Court. The TAC is seeking an urgent interdict to stop Rath advertising that anti-retrovirals will kill people with HIV/Aids. This, the TAC says, is endangering South Africa's anti-retroviral (ARV) roll-out programme.
Rath has also accused the TAC of being a pharmaceutical industry "front organisation" and of paying people to take part in its demonstrations.
According to a London newspaper report in April last year, the German child Dominik became a cause celebre in Germany after his parents, Josef and Anke, defied a leading cancer doctor's advice that to save their son and stop his cancer from spreading, his right leg should be amputated.
Instead, the Felds chose to pursue Rath's "cell therapy" treatment.
In November 2003 Germany's social services obtained a court order to remove the boy from his parents' custody on the grounds that they were not acting in his best interests.
The Felds appealed, a five-month legal tussle followed, and the parents got Dominik back.
He died in November.
The South African health news service, Health-e News Service, has also reported on the issue, saying Rath has peddled his vitamin product, Vitacor, around the world - first as a cure for heart disease, then cancer, and now Aids.
They said the Swiss Study Group for Complementary Alternative Methods in Cancer, and the Swiss Cancer League had found "no proof that the vitamin preparations of Dr Matthias Rath have any effect on human cancer and advise against their use in cancer prevention and treatment".
Pharmacology Professor Frank Meyer, writing in the British Medical Journal, found "no proper evidence for the claimed beneficial effects on morbidity, mortality, and quality of life associated with coronary heart disease, heart insufficiency, high blood pressure, arrhythmia, and diabetes".
Several countries do not allow the sale of Rath's products because they defy classification as nutritional supplements, medicines or foods, Health-e reported.
The vitamin doses were too high for nutritional supplements. They had not passed the necessary scientific trials to be medicines, and they claimed to heal, which is not allowed for food products.
The website Chemistry Daily reports that Rath was born in 1955 in Stuttgart, Germany, and describes him as a "controversial German
physician".
He practised at the University Clinic of Hamburg and the German Heart Centre in Berlin, the website says.
The website also refers to the Dominik Feld case, saying that Franc Ulrich Montgomery, chairman of the Marburger Foundation (translated roughly as Federation of German Physicians), and Michael Bamberg of the German Cancer Foundation, had demanded "legal procedures be taken against Dr Rath's methods and nutritional food supplement preparations" following Dominik's death.
In South Africa in March the Advertising Standards Authority ruled in favour of the TAC after it laid a complaint about Rath's advertisements here which were headed: "Why should South Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT?"
The Rath Foundation has also come in for criticism from the South African Medical Association, Cosatu, the Southern African HIV Clinicians' Society, the United Nations and the Western Cape government.
The UN said in a statement in March that Rath's advertising campaign touting the benefits of vitamin therapy above anti-retrovirals, and claiming that anti-retroviral therapy is toxic, were incorrect and misleading.
They condemned the "irresponsible linking" of their name to claims that vitamins and nutrition therapy alone could prevent Aids deaths, referring specifically to Rath's flyers and advertisements in South Africa and to information on his website.
"Misrepresentation of this sort is both dangerous and unhelpful," the UN said.
The Southern African HIV Clinicians' Society warned that continuing confusion around HIV/Aids ultimately "ends in more deaths of HIV-infected South Africans". - Health Writer.
