Rath drops case agains the UK Guardian newspaper

The controversial peddler of vitamin supplements that he claimed cured HIV and AIDS, has dropped his year long liable case against the UK's Guardian newspaper. He has been ordered to pay costs.

Dr Rath, a German born doctor who once worked in California on the possible therapeutic effects of micronutrients with the Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling and claimed to be his nominated successor, sued the newspaper over three articles written by Ben Goldacre in his column Bad Science.

In articles published in January and February last year, Dr Goldacre described Dr Rath (not the only promoter of unproved nutritional therapies in a South Africa where the government was known to doubt the efficacy of antiretrovirals) as the "German vitamin impresario who claims that his vitamin pills are better for AIDS than medication."

The Dr Rath Foundation sells micronutrient supplements through a website aimed specifically at the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, France, Spain, South Africa, and most recently Russia.

In 2002 the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled against Dr Rath over a newsletter entitled Good Health: Do It Yourself, which claimed that nutritional supplements could prevent diseases such as cancer and heart disease. The authority said that the claim was not backed by evidence. Similarly, in the same year, the US Food and Drug Administration ordered the Dr Rath Foundation to cease making unproved therapeutic claims on its website about its product Vitacor Plus, marketed as offering "fundamental protection for the cardiovascular system."

In 2005 Dr Rath began to distribute one of his products, VitaCell, to HIV positive people in Khayelitsha, a shanty town outside Cape Town. At the same time he denounced the antiretroviral therapy that the South African government was under pressure to roll out to its people as toxic and dangerous, attacking the drug industry as profit hungry and unscrupulous.

He appeared to have the tacit support of the Minister of Health, but was brought to book by court action by the Treatment Action Campaign, when in June this year the campaign won a ruling from the South African High Court that the Dr Rath Foundation study of vitamins for HIV positive patients was an illegal trial and had to be stopped.