Sea ‘Medicine’ Defended

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31596, 6 February 1968, Page 13

Sea ‘Medicine’ Defended

(N.Z.P. A. -Reuter—Copy right) MILAN (Italy), Feb. 4. Clement Gubbay, an international dealer in pharmaceuticals, today denied a charge that he sent to South Vietnam as medicine plain sea water, for which the United States paid $24,000.

Mr Gubbay told a news conference that the substance was “a true and proper medicine sold to the public only by medical prescription.”

A United States Senate subcommittee was told on January 31 that the United States Agency for International De-

velopment-Aid underwrote the purchase of Mr Gubbay’s product, called “bioceane,” for use by South Vietnamese civilians. Mr Daniel Cohen, of the Aid Comptroller’s Office, told the Senators that the agency believed the product was used to treat nausea and skin eruptions, but that it was really plain sea water. Mr Gubbay is president of the United Pharmaceutical Laboratories, Puerto Rico, which, he says, makes the questioned product on licence from a French company. He told reporters: “The substance meet; the most severe requirements of control imposed by the sanitary authorities in the countries where it is sold . . . The method of its preparation is owned by «

Alfred Daniel Brunet Company, of Boulogne-sur-Seine, France.

“It is based,” he said, “on sea water taken many miles from a coastline by special techniques and submitted, successively, to many laboratory procedures.”

“The product is used as a solvent for antibiotics and also to correct saline imbalances in the body.” Mr Gubbay added that the substance was sold only to private importers in Vietnam and that it was registered with the Saigon Health Ministry. Mr Cohen told the Senate committee that Mr Gubbay had been suspended from aid dealings and that the agency has tightened its procedures to avoid - transactions of the same nature.