Page 72 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Positively into the New South Africa: The MRC, 1995–2012

same time it still often found itself in collision with those holding opposing beliefs
about HIV/AIDS and its treatment. For instance, in 2003 Dr Mark Colvin, an MRC
researcher who had carried out research for the National Department of Health on the
provision of ARVT to pregnant women was barred by that department from explaining
his methodology in a paper to the South African AIDS Conference in Durban because
providing ARVT was not yet official policy. However, the MRC opposed this unilateral
decision and gave its support to the paper’s delivery, which won the author the applause
of the audience when he explained this background to them. On the other hand, MRC
researchers steeped in Western-style allopathic medicine must have swallowed hard in
2004 when, at a gathering at ‘Medicina’ itself, Tshabalala-Msimang lauded traditional
African remedies like beetroot, African potatoes, onions, lemons and garlic for the
treatment of HIV and enthusiastically announced, ‘We are trying to wean our people
off antiretrovirals … I know that a lot of people are using traditional medicines and are
getting better.’ Presumably, the R6 million her department provided to the MRC to
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investigate the claims by traditional healers that they had found an immune-boosting
cure for the disease made her ideas easier to swallow.
Certainly Dr Anthony Mbewu executive director of research at the MRC from 1996
and Makgoba’s successor-but-one as president from 2004 to 2009, was not unimpressed
by the possibility of immune boosting to counter AIDS. This led him to flirt with the
idea that vitamin tablets made by the well-heeled German Rath Foundation might be
an effective treatment against AIDS instead of AZT, which the Foundation believed
was toxic. However, so sharp was the outcry by AIDS doctors and NGOs like the
Treatment Action Campaign that this was quackery that Mbewu did not pursue this
initiative. A South African Medical Association spokesperson warned him: ‘If you’re
the premier medical institution in the country, you have to use discretion in deciding
whom you take money from. Who is pulling the purse strings affects the credibility
and the results, and in this case it’s a highly, highly, highly questionable source.’
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However, this flirtation proved to be not the last of Mbewu’s ill-judged decisions as
president.

Research, commercialization and communication
If HIV/AIDS loomed larger and larger in the MRC’s research purview in these years,
thanks to the Council’s improving financial position this did not come at the cost of
research into other areas. Increasingly these were to be determined by their pertinence
to actual health problems in South Africa (i.e. applied research) rather than by their
purely scientific interest (i.e. basic research). In Prozesky’s words, far less priority

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