Killer vitamins

Quack medicines

The Champagne corks were popping today at the Guardian.

An attempt to silence them and their ace journalist Ben Goldacre has collapsed. In his Bad Science column Ben exposed the claims of a Vitamin Aids ‘cure’ peddled in South Africa.

Matthias Rath, the vitamin campaigner was accused of endangering thousands of lives in South Africa by promoting his pills while denouncing conventional medicines as toxic and dangerous. He has now dropped a year-long libel action against the Guardian and been ordered to pay costs.

I hope the costs are enormous. Rath is not the first to try to use his wealth to silence the truth. Rath’s campaign almost certainly led to the deaths of those who abandoned retro-virals in exchange for his vitamin pills. While there is well-founded cynicism about the exaggerated claims of the Pharmaceutical industry, it does not mean that quack medicines are acceptable alternatives.

I had a constituent who refused to take the conventional treatment for a potentially fatal illness. She sought alternative treatment. I urged her to use both. She refused. She died within six months. Another woman in my constituency who was in identical circumstances took the conventional therapies and is alive and well now, ten years later.

Whether out of ignorance or cynical malice, many lesser newspapers than the Guardian encourage the use of alternative medicines at the expense of treatments that are scientifically tested. One of the worst cases was the MMR Daily Mail hoax that cut the take-up of the triple vaccine to dangerous levels.

The Dr Rath Foundation focuses its promotional activities on eight countries - the US, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, France and Russia - claiming that his micronutrient products will cure not just Aids, but cancer, heart disease, strokes and other illnesses. The group is reputed to have made millions from their vitamin pills. He is now concentrating on Russia.

Congratulations Ben and the Guardian. This is journalism at its courageous best. Not only did they expose these dangerous falsehoods but they also risked crippling financial losses by standing up to richly endowed lawyers out to gag them. MPs face the same threats. Sadly we are not always well resourced enough to withstand the threat of bankruptcy.

Quack medicines are sweeping Europe especially in the science free nutritional field. This may well be an issue that the Council of Europe should adopt on Europe wide scale.

See the Guardian video. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/12/matthiasrath.aids2

Faltering plot

The only sensible explanation I can suggest is that it’s a ploy to distract attention from the Lib-Dems conference.

Siobhain McDonagh MP, and an assorted tiny band of eight tentative rebels are behaving oddly. Apart from Graham Stringer, Frank Field and Kate Hoey, who are in a state of permanent Brown betrayal, the others involved in this micro-plot have never voted against the Government, i.e. they were all in favour of the Iraq War.

All conventional wisdom in the Labour Party is that there will be no leadership election this year, and probably not early next. The conventional foolishness is there should be. There are 349 Labour MPs. The 8 have a long way to go to reach the  70 that are  needed to force a leadership bid. As one of the very small number of Labour MPs who did not nominated Gordon Brown last year, I have been approached by the media for my views. Yesterday the Beeb asked whether I was going to write to the Labour Party asking for a nomination form. I said it would be a sinful waste of a stamp.

It is certain that dozens of Labour MPs have been equally dismissive of the plottees. Our responses are not mentioned. Not to worry.

Who has heard anything about the Lib-Dems conference/?

Comments

[valleylad]

One area that Dr Goldacre promotes that politicians could do something useful about would be a public register of clinical trials. Couple this with a no claims without evidence to alternative medicine and you could slay bad big pharm (hiding negatives) and quacks with one bill at virtually no cost to anyone.

[pv]

Britain has its own Matthias Rath. His name is Patrick Holford (aka, Pilltrick Holfraud). Apart from being associated with Rath and having been to South Africa to spread the word about his pills and how much better vitanin C is for AIDS than AZT, he is very popular with the celebrity obsessed dimwits running British TV.

[PaulFlynn]

Thanks Valley lad. I agree. The UK is caught between a Big Pharma backed MHRA and a battery of quacks using bad science.

GSK were hammered for not publishing negative and neutral results.on Seroxat.

[PaulFlynn]

Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science has a chapter on Patrick Holford. As you say KV. he is out of the same stable as Matthias Rath, another disciple of Linus Pauling.

It is astonishing that he is given so much air-time to spout dangerous nonsense.