JOHANNESBURG (AFP) — South Africa's leading anti-AIDS lobby called on Friday for the health minister to be sacked after a court ordered a private clinic to stop touting its multi-vitamin pills as a treatment for HIV.
The Treatment Action Campaign said Manto Tshabalala-Msimang should be axed for failing to stop self-proclaimed German nutrition guru Matthias Rath from promoting a multi-vitamin treatment over government-sponsored anti-retrovirals.
The call came after the high court in Cape Town said that Rath and his foundation must stop advertising his VitaCell multi-vitamins until they are approved by the Medicine Control Council of South Africa.
Rath, 53, who studied medicine in Germany, has allegedly been peddling his vitamin pills mainly in the poor black township of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town, one of the many areas hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic in the country.
In a press conference after the ruling, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) said Tshabalala-Msimang -- dubbed Dr Beetroot for her own advocacy of vegetables in the fight against AIDS -- had failed in her public duty.
"We have a Medicines Act to prevent people from being exploited by charlatans, and it is the duty of the minister of health to ensure that that act is implemented," TAC spokesman Nathan Geffen told reporters.
"She's wilfully flouted that law and she's promoted quack remedies.
"We believe that the ANC (governing party) and the president (Thabo Mbeki) have to demonstrate their commitment to the rule of law and immediately relieve the minister of her duties."
The TAC has long been at loggerheads with Tshabalala-Msimang, who attracted international ridicule when she displayed beetroot, garlic and lemons at a South African stand at the 2006 world AIDS conference in Toronto, Canada.
South Africa has the world's highest rate of HIV with some 5.5 million of the 47 million population affected by the virus.
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