David Southall, the consultant paediatrician who has been the target of child abuse campaigners over many years, has been cleared by the General Medical Council of all allegations relating to his research on newborn babies, it emerged yesterday.

Professor Southall still faces two separate cases at the GMC relating to his child protection work.

The preliminary proceedings committee threw out a third case last Thursday.

Yesterday Prof Southall hit out at the campaigners who have made hundreds of complaints against him about every aspect of his work, not only to the GMC but also to the North Staffordshire NHS Trust, where he works, and to various police forces.

Complaints over his trials of a new ventilator to aid the breathing of sick or premature babies have damaged neonatal research in this country, he said.

"It is important to acknowledge that the birth of a disabled child is a tragedy for any family," he said in a statement yesterday.

"It is also right and proper that families should seek legal redress when there has been negligence.

"That is not, however, what happened in North Staffordshire. Here a group of malicious individuals seeking to destroy our child protection work latched on to the concerns of a vulnerable group of parents whose babies had either died or become damaged as a result of premature birth. Many of the latter came, over time, to resent and resist the way their concerns were being used in this way."

It took the GMC seven years to throw out the allegations relating to the CNEP (continuous negative pressure) ventilator, including the claim that parental consent forms had been forged and that babies had unnecessarily died.

The campaigners had meanwhile won a government inquiry, chaired by Rod Griffiths, which in 2000 upheld some of the allegations by parents who said they had not signed a consent form and did not know their baby was in a trial.

The conclusions of the Griffiths report were lambasted in the pages of the British Medical Journal by two senior doctors, Sir Iain Chalmers of the Cochrane Centre and the paediatrician Edmund Hay.

They said the report was ill-informed, misguided and factually incorrect.

"This review was not conducted to the standard to be expected of any reputable inquiry into allegations of research misconduct," they wrote.

Prof Southall, who was suspended for two years by his NHS Trust during its own inquiry into his research and child protection work but was cleared and reinstated in 2001, says the Griffiths report "seriously damaged public confidence in neonatal research in this country" and called for it to be withdrawn by the government.

Sir Iain Chalmers agreed yesterday that the campaign against Prof Southall and his colleagues had been damaging to medical research.

"Why on earth would you do research involving babies when you can work in a lab and say you are working on a cure for something and never put yourself at risk of the sort of trauma they have been through?" he said.

Prof Southall and the GMC said they could not comment on the two remaining cases against him, which will be heard later this year.