A former ally of the Treatment Action Campaign, the Traditional Healers Organisation, has made fresh allegations that the TAC is funded by the global pharmaceutical industry.
These and other allegations, including that the TAC failed to warn people living with HIV and Aids of the toxicity of anti-retrovirals, are part of court documents filed with the Cape High Court on Monday.
The Traditional Healers Organisation has brought an application to join the court battle between the TAC and the Dr Rath Health Foundation.
The organisation is supported in this application by Nompumelelo Practitioners Traditional Healers Organisation and the National Association of People Living with HIV and Aids.
The TAC has launched an application against Rath's foundation to stop it from making defamatory statements, including that the TAC is a front for the pharmaceutical industry.
The traditional healers claim in court papers, filed by Cape Town law firm Nongogo Nuku Attorneys on Monday, that when their organisation was part of the TAC they began investigating the organisation's "promotion of these dangerous pharmaceutical drugs to the exclusion of natural therapies".
In her founding affidavit Phephesile Maseko, national co-ordinator of the Traditional Healers Organisation, said: "The organisation discovered that the TAC is financed in part by the pharmaceutical industry, with the funding it receives laundered through other ARV drug-promoting organisations, as documented in the answering affidavits... in the main application (between the TAC and Rath)."
Maseko said that soon after her organisation had been admitted as a TAC member in 2000, it "became apparent that the TAC was interested in campaigning for the provision of Western pharmaceutical drugs exclusively".
She said the organisation's leadership became "dismayed and disillusioned" by the TAC's alleged breach of its constitutional mandate to "campaign for equitable access to affordable treatment for all people with HIV and Aids" and for "affordable and quality health care for all people with HIV and Aids" - including African traditional medicine envisaged by the broad definition of "treatment" in the TAC's constitution.
Maseko alleges that when the traditional healers took issue with the TAC over this, the TAC responded by sidelining the organisation.
"The organisation was also excluded from TAC congresses, which it had previously attended as a key stakeholder."
Maseko said: "One of the organisation's major concerns was the fact that its practitioners were reporting an increasing number of patients who had been seriously harmed by the toxic effects of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, such as AZT."
The Traditional Healers Organisation was excluded from participation at the People's Health Summit held by the TAC in East London in July 2004, despite its request to be included.
With the breakdown of relations between the Traditional Healers Organisation and the TAC, the organisation stopped co-operating with the TAC.
According to Maseko, in July 2004 the Medicines Control Council (MCC) proposed the promulgation of new regulations in terms of the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act 101/1965 that would have effectively banned all traditional African medicine by subjecting all natural therapies to the same regulatory regime as applied to dangerous, synthetic drugs.
Maseko said this would have criminalised all traditional medicines not licensed by the MCC in the same manner as pharmaceutical drugs.
"The approval procedure, involving large and expensive clinical trials for each herbal remedy employed in traditional African medicine, would have been completely unaffordable for the reason that their sale does not yield profits sufficient to finance such trials, due to their unpatentability."
Following the joint campaigning of the Traditional Healers Organisation and the Dr Rath Health Foundation against the approval of the proposed new regulations, Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang rejected them.
"The TAC... actively and publicly supported the passage of the draft new regulations, thereby revealing its allegiance with the commercial interests of the pharmaceutical industry.
"The Traditional Healers Organisation has worked in alliance with the Dr Rath Health Foundation with the goal of ensuring health for all South Africans."