ADVERTS FOR FAKE SWAZI NURSES

News that ‘fake’ nurses are operating in Swaziland raises questions about how advertisers in the kingdom are able to trick people.

The Swaziland Nurses Association (SNA) wants the Ministry of Health to set up a body to screen the content of adverts to make sure they are truthful.

The Times of Swaziland reported on Wednesday (5 March 2008) that the move from SNA follows the ‘mushrooming of clinics which advertise themselves in the media claiming they have medicine and herbs that cure HIV AIDS’.

SNA believes peoples’ lives are in danger as a result of advertisers who claim to be nurses but they are not.

The type of advertising the SNA complains of is not unusual in Swaziland. Unlike in other countries, such as neighbouring South Africa, there is no formal organisation in existence to oversee the quality of advertising and to issue code of regulations to advertisers. These codes help to ensure that misleading adverts do not get to see the light of day.

The Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa (ASASA) issues codes of conduct on all types of advertising. For example, an advertisement from a nurse claiming that drugs would ‘cure HIV AIDS’ would contravene a code that states ‘Advertising shall not contain improper, alarming or misleading claims of a recovery.’

Many adverts that you see every day of the week in Swaziland would not be allowed in South Africa.

As an example, in the same edition of the Times that carried the report from SNA, there was a large advert for a product called Oto ‘Super Powerful Man Tablets’.

Part of the advert has the following lines

Do you suffer from
- Low Sexual Drive
- Weak Erection
- Premature ejaculation.

It then offers ‘Be effective for 48 hours’ before going on to claim

- Safe and free of side effects
- Can be used by diabetics and
- People with high blood pressure.

‘The number one natural product for Sexual Vitality’

The advert breaks a number of ASASA regulations, including: ‘Advertising shall not contain improper, alarming or misleading claims of a recovery’ and ‘Advertising shall not claim, or imply, that a product’s effects are guaranteed.’

The call from SNA for some body to oversee advertising is one that deserves support. The advertising industry is very small in Swaziland because – frankly – people in the kingdom are so poor that they cannot afford the goods and services that advertisers want to sell to them.

It also deserves support because many people do not lead sophisticated lives and with relatively little formal education they do not have inquiring minds and are likely to take advertisers’ claims at face value.

There is also more than a hint of desperation involved too. Some people with HIV might desperately want a ‘cure’ and be willing to believe anything an unscrupulous advertiser might tell them.

And of course, who wouldn’t want to be ‘Super Powerful Man’ when it came to the Sexual Vitality Department?