So how does the independent observer evaluate these, Gene ?

Health-e said in a story posted on its website on Thursday that another woman, a “high-profile” Rath foundation agent who had been promoting the vitamins in Cape Town’s Gugulethu, died a few months after rejecting ARVs and would be buried this Saturday.

Controversial vitamin seller Dr Matthias Rath has gone on trial for fraud in Germany after he convinced the parents of a boy with bone cancer to reject conventional medicine and use his “miracle cure” vitamin pills instead, according to the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

The Treatment Action Campaign is set to take up yet another volley in an attempt to stop the controversial vitamin seller Dr Matthias Rath. The Rath Foundation has been accused of promoting its vitamins as a cure for AIDS and encouraging HIV positive people to abandon their antiretroviral (ARV) drugs

Health-e News Service welcomes the decision by Dr Matthias Rath to withdraw his defamation case against the agency, employees Anso Thom and Khopotso Bodibe and freelancer Siviwe Minyi (case number 11681/05) and to pay our legal costs to date.

The unchallenged actions of Dr Matthias Rath and his foundation, are undermining government’s policy to provide comprehensive treatment for HIV and AIDS and endangers people’s lives. These concerns are in a letter written to the Western Cape’s Health MEC Pierre Uys and signed by 199 health professionals. Spokesperson for the group, Dr Andrew Boulle, spoke to Health-e.

The above assertion by Mr. Semon about Dr. Ewan Cameron appears to be erroneous. He probably confused Dr. Cameron with the late psychiatrist Dr. Humphrey Osmond, who once conducted LSD research under government auspices. Dr. Osmond was an associate of Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D., and it was Dr. Hoffer who later collaborated with Linus Pauling on research papers and a book.

Then what’s the connection between war and vitamins? What possible reason could there be to believe that the Bush administration is pushing for world war in order to save the drug industry from the competitive threat of nutritional supplements? If there is any such reason, why would it be missing from a major newspaper ad charging such a connection? Without even the hint of a reason for a connection, the message that comes across from the ad is that the writer is apparently delusional, and possibly insane.

I’m well aware of the Project for a New American Century (of which Cheney was a co-signer), and of the Neocons’ declared willingness to use war to further their ends of controlling oil and making the Middle East safe for Israel. But Rath in his ad says that oil has nothing to do with it – that it’s all about fighting vitamins. Assuming he’s not irrational, what’s the rationale?

This in no way means that Dr. Rath is a charlatan. His foundation in fact has marshalled considerable scientific evidence to support the potential value of nutritional supplementation in AIDS, cancer, and heart disease.

By the way, the late Scottish surgeon Dr. Ewan Cameron was, like his collaborator Linus Pauling, a heroic pioneer in the the use of vitamin C against cancer. I do not know that he was involved in any CIA experiment (since he was a Scottish citizen this seems doubtful), but I do know that he was a physician and scientist of great compassion and integrity.