CAIRO: In a statement issued by Medizone International Inc., Dr Gerard Sunnen, MD, former president and director of research for Medizone, said that he had filed charges of human rights violations against the New York State Department of Health (NYSDH) on behalf of Egyptian hepatitis sufferers.
The NYSDH had forced the closure of a research project into alternative treatments for Hepatitis C in Egypt, according to a press release from the company conducting the research.
Dr Sunnen’s statement, issued on Jan. 28, said that it had been forced to halt its research into complementary therapies for the virus, which affects some five million Egyptians, after the NYSDH put pressure on the National Research Center (NRC) in Cairo to withdraw the company’s authority to continue its work here.
He added that the move reflected the NYSDH’s opposition to the development of affordable complimentary therapies, in favor of more expensive traditional treatments.
”The motives seem clear, said Sunnen. “The NYSDH strongly opposes complementary therapies. More importantly, however, is the influence of special interests, potent economic forces fighting to keep the status quo on established pharmaceutical pipelines. Conventional Hepatitis C drug therapies are prohibitively costly for such large target populations and are inordinately prone to failure and to serious side effects. The Medizone process, by contrast, is considerably less onerous.
“For a state agency like the NYSDH to actively interfere in the internal operations of a company engaged in an international goodwill mission is as puzzling as it is out rightly destructive, he added.
“Special interests and other agendas can all too easily kill innovative medical research, Sunnen stated, adding that in this case, “the public interest invariably suffers. The disenfranchised include not only the millions of Egyptian patients, but also the some 170 million people who, according to World Health Organization estimates, are afflicted with this serious disease. Sunnen said that he was filing charges against the NYSDH in order to represent the many Egyptian patients who would be affected by the decision to halt the research.
“Patients have a right to the fruits of research created to benefit them. By bringing down this study the NYSDH transgressed fundamental human rights and tampered with international goodwill, he said.
Daily News Egypt contacted the National Research Center for comment, but the organization’s president, Dr Hany Al-Nazer, said that he was unaware of the matter. A similar response came from the Egypt offices of the World Health Organization.
In Egypt, according to the statement, Hepatitis C pandemic has been growing for decades. Scientific studies showed that around 20 percent of the Egyptian population has at one point been infected with the virus.
The treatment that Medizone was exploring was a technique called “blood ozonation, which Dr Sunnen says could greatly reduce the cost of current treatments for Hepatitis C, if successful.
