South Africa

Natural cures to get the all-clear

Minister to scrap testing law

January 17, 2005 Edition 1

Jo-Anne Smetherham

Cape Town: Health Minister Manto Tshabalala- Msimang says draft legislation that alternative practitioners believe could cripple complementary medicine in the country is likely to be changed.

This would mean that African traditional medicines, homeopathic remedies, Chinese and Ayurvedic medicines and others would not have to go through the rigorous testing that the practitioners believed would sound the death knell for their industry.

Tshabalala-Msimang said in a statement that her department "would like to avoid the pitfall of putting such products in the same regulatory environment as pharmaceutical drugs, whose testing and control is very different".

The statement followed the health minister's speech at an international conference on natural products and molecular therapy at the University of Cape Town Medical School. The draft regulations state that alternative medicines should be regulated in the same way as patented conventional drugs.

Trials

If this draft were passed into law, alternative medicines would have to undergo trials designed for Western medicines and a pharmacist would have had to oversee their manufacture.

Experts say complementary medicine cannot afford expensive, large-scale trials because alternative medicines are not patented.

"It's fantastic news. If what the minister is saying comes to pass, it would be of benefit to everyone in South Africa," said Janet Welham, Co-chairman of the Complementary and Traditional Medicine Stakeholder Committee, which has been in negotiations with the Health Department and Precious Matsosa, the Medicines Control Council Registrar.

"This news is exactly what our committee has been trying to negotiate for," Welham said.

At least 80% of South Africans used African, Chinese, Ayurvedic or South American traditional medicines, she said. The proportion would be greater if homeopathic and other complementary medicines were included.

South Africans spent R3 billion a year on complementary medicines, Welham said.

Stigmatised

Tshabalala-Msimang said the study of indigenous knowledge was "an opportunity to reclaim Africa's scientific and socio-cultural heritage, which was stigmatised and discredited as primitive rituals and witchcraft by colonialism and apartheid".

She urged delegates to expose "the false dichotomy that had arisen between natural and allopathic medicine".

"This is a division fostered by the need to make money from patented drugs through discrediting the use of natural products," she said.

The health department has ploughed R6 million into the testing of the safety, efficacy and quality of traditional medicines that are used as immune boosters by people with HIV/Aids.

The first phase of testing the safety of one of these medicines was completed late last year and the research had shown promising results, the health minister said.

Traditional knowledge of medicines was much older than the 150-year-old history of allopathic medicines and it drew on the rich heritage and culture of the earliest civilisations of the world in Africa, Central America, China and India, she said.

The government also funds research at universities and science councils into the efficacy of traditional medicines used to treat tuberculosis, malaria, asthma, cancer, diabetes, anxiety, stress and musculoskeletal disorders.