Cancer." South African Council of Churches To address the "confusion" created by Rath's advertising campaign, the South African Council of Churches issued a statement that Rath's activities in South Africa "can only be interpreted as misguided strategies to promote Rath's own brand of nutritional supplements." The Council affirmed the importance of both antiretroviral medication and good nutrition for people with HIV, and pointed out that multivitamins are distributed by public health services and need not be obtained from Rath's organisation. Legal cases Rath has been involved in a number of legal cases. In 2000, the Court of Almelo in the Netherlands ordered Rath to stop making unfounded, false, and defamatory statements about the Dutch pharmaceutical company Numico. In 2002, the British Advertising Standards Authority found that advertisements by Rath contained a series of misleading and false claims and ordered the claims removed. In 2002, the United States Food and Drug Administration notified Rath that he was promoting his vitamin supplements in a manner that violated the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, by making claims of efficacy without undergoing the appropriate scientific and regulatory review. In 2005, the Advertising Standards Association of South Africa (ASASA) issued three separate rulings against Rath, finding that he had made false and misleading claims regarding the effectiveness of his supplements and describing his advertisements as "reckless in the extreme". Rath continued the advertisements, leading the ASASA to rule that, "in light of the gravity of [Rath's] breaches", he was required to submit all further advertising to the ASASA for prior approval. In 2006, the High Court of South Africa found that Rath had defamed the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an AIDS nonprofit organisation, by publicly making false and misleading statements about the TAC. Rath was ordered to cease his defamatory remarks "to ensure that the TAC's continued participation in the debate is not hamstrung by defamatory and unfounded allegations." In 2006, the 22 July issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) reported that Rath had gone on trial in Hamburg "for fraud" in relation to the death of Dominik Feld. The BMJ subsequently retracted its report "on legal advice" and apologised to Rath, stating that the BMJ accepted that "the allegations we published were without foundation." A subsequent libel claim by Rath was settled by the BMJ for £100,000. In 2006, Rath was prosecuted in Germany for distributing vitamins over the internet without a