Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - November 30, 2004
Rowan Philp and Edwin Lombard

'I'm completely obsessed with doing all inmy power to bring to the attention of the South African public the fact that AZT is deadly poisonous and completely useless. African traditional medicines have been used to good effect for thousands of years'

THEY said there was no Aids epidemic in Africa.

They said that Aids was caused by everything from diesel fumes to exposure to electromagnetic fields, not HIV.

And President Thabo Mbeki invited them to help form health policy in South Africa.

Four years after the radical views of a group of Aids dissidents were given extraordinary government attention, leading doctors and Aids experts this week declared their influence on policy "dead".

The final nail, they said, was quietly pushed into the dissident coffin last month by a finding by Advocate Lawrence Mushwana, the Public Protector, that rejected a dissident complaint against the government's year-old comprehensive Aids treatment plan.

However, dissidents - claiming that experts had failed to prove a link between HIV and Aids in those four years - vowed to carry their message to the streets. Leaders of the health profession warned that "crackpot theories" were becoming "fashionable" among an increasing number of ordinary citizens.

This week, the man who first got Mbeki interested in dissident thinking, Advocate Anthony Brink, teamed up with Dr Matthias Rath, a fringe natural-medicine figure, and took to the streets of Cape Town.

Forming the newest face of the movement, the pair organised protests with traditional healers against the Treatment Action Campaign, accusing it of being a front for drug companies by ignoring the role of traditional remedies in fighting the disease.

Brink also organised a mass meeting in Athlone, Cape Town, on Thursday, putting a new slant - African solutions - on his anti-AZT line.

He declared: "I'm completely obsessed with doing all in my power to bring to the attention of the South African public the fact that AZT is deadly poisonous and completely useless.

"African traditional medicines have been used to good effect for thousands of years."

Rath is a controversial international campaigner for the use of natural remedies. His theories on the treatment of cancer have been rejected by health authorities all over the world.

Experts said that - having lost the battle to influence the government - the dissidents were repositioning themselves to peddle their theories to the public.

Responding to a charge by a Johannesburg dissident, journalist Anita Allen, that the new government Aids strategy was wrong and illegal because it was based on the premise that HIV caused Aids, Mushwana found: "The Cabinet's decision to approve the operational plan was proper and in accordance with . . . the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS."

The finding follows three years in which the President's Aids Advisory Panel - featuring both an "orthodox" and a dissident group - has failed to meet or even circulate correspondence.

Brink said dissidents were "no longer" advising the South African government on Aids.

He said fellow dissident Professor Peter Duesberg was pursuing cancer research at the University of California at Berkeley, and "suffering" peer scorn due to his stance on Aids, while Dr David Rasnick was running a dissident e-mail newsletter in nearby Oakland.

He said Dr Roberto Giraldo was working at a hospital in New York but continuing research on Aids.

Nathan Geffen, spokesman for the Treatment Action Campaign, said the dissident phenomenon stood apart from all other popular false beliefs in that it had been endorsed by a government, and had placed the lives of thousands at risk.

This week, experts including Dr Fareed Abdullah, director of the Western Cape's HIV/Aids programme, and Professor Salim Abdool Karim, a former member of Mbeki's Aids Advisory Panel, said the high point of the dissidents' influence had been when the President agreed to fund a collaborative experiment, designed to test the validity of HIV testing, in early 2001.

Allen - who has helped to inform Mbeki's view on Aids with a dossier on the scientific flaws of the HIV premise - said this week that the key obstacle to dissidents had been the fact that the HIV test experiment had yet to be conducted. She said meetings about it had petered out early in 2002.

Political pressure to see the experiment happen sank at precisely the same rate as Mbeki's withdrawal from the Aids debate.

"We are at an impasse now - there is no patron for the completion of the test except Thabo Mbeki, who has stepped down from the subject," she said.

Abdullah said: "My sense is that [the dissidents] have had their day."

Karim, now deputy vice-chancellor of research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said: "They are a spent force."

Karim described his experience on the Aids Advisory Panel: "It was surreal. I simply found their arguments silly. But another problem about these dissidents was they all held different, individual theories - Duesberg believed HIV existed, but was just a harmless passenger virus; the Australians didn't believe HIV exists at all; [Dr Harvey] Bialy actually believed that AZT causes Aids itself."

Tine van der Maas - creator of the famed "olive oil, garlic and lemon" Aids diet, and adviser to Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang - made headlines last year for disputing mainstream treatments of Aids, but was not a dissident as such.

However, this week the self-styled nutritionist declared that she had "converted" to being an Aids dissident this year after experimenting with an HIV test on herself. Although she'd had recent viral illnesses, Van der Maas said she had neither received a blood transfusion nor had sex in the past decade, but had still tested "half positive".

"I no longer believe HIV is sexually transmitted," she said.

When she was reached by phone by the Sunday Times, Van der Maas was shooting a "video documentary" on poor patients in rural KwaZulu-Natal - with a production team comprising her mother and herself.

"It's so frustrating - we are tired of being called quacks," she said. "So we are filming and photographing everything so that people will believe me when I say people are dying because of poor nutrition; because eating patterns have changed."

Johannesburg chemical engineer Greg Benvenuti, 26 - who has no personal or professional connection to Aids - is one of a small but growing group of non-scientists who have adopted the dissident "obsession".

Already a friend of both Brink and Van der Maas, Benvenuti said he spent hours every week raising the "debate" with colleagues and even doctors.

This week, South Africa's top Aids researcher, Professor Robin Wood, said: "To tell people that unprotected sex is not a risk factor [for HIV/Aids] borders on the criminal. [Government endorsement] undermined the patient-doctor relationship - we appeared to be contradicting people they held in high esteem."

Brink likens his "complete obsession" to the struggle of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.

In a series of letters this year, Brink has been trying to convince the Medicines Control Council not to provide AZT and nevirapine to HIV-positive pregnant women. The MCC has never responded.

Brink said he still had close links with Tshabalala-Msimang and Mbeki.

He said: "It is all a load of rubbish. Aids is not a disease, it's a syndrome. It is a basketful of primordial diseases including common diseases like TB."

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