Striving4Zen

It's nothing to sneeze at.

Airborne, the herbal-supplement maker, has agreed to pay through the nose - $23.3 million to be exact - to settle a class-action suit charging it falsely advertised its best-selling products can cure the common cold.

The company denies any wrongdoing but has agreed to settle the suit, filed in 2006.

"Airborne is basically an overpriced, run-of-the-mill vitamin pill that's been cleverly, but deceptively, marketed," said David Schardt, a senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, one of the parties to the suit.

"There's no credible evidence that what's in Airborne can prevent colds."

Airborne is the brainchild of Victoria Knight-McDowell, a former second-grade teacher in Carmel, Calif., and her husband, Rider McDowell, a freelance writer.

According to her Web site, Knight-McDowell created Airborne in 1999 after getting one cold after another from her young students.

As a marketing strategy, the McDowells insisted drugstores place the product with cold medicines, even though it's a dietary supplement.

As long as makers of dietary supplements don't make specific health claims, they don't have to prove to the feds that the products work.

That was the rub.

Airborne said its claim for curing the common cold was based on a clinical trial.

Some medical experts have cautioned that a possible downside to using Airborne is that it may provide too much vitamin A. Two of the pills provide 10,000 IU, considered the maximum safe level - and yet users are urged to take three of the pills daily.

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