Health shops’ fear over EU ban on herbal medicines
CONSUMERS will no longer be able to buy certain herbal medicines over the counter from tomorrow as a European directive regulating their sale comes into force.
As of May 1, individual herbal medicines must be licensed if they are to be sold over the counter.
A total of 105 herbal medicines have been licensed so far under the UK Governments Traditional Herbal Registration scheme, which indicates a product has met required standards of quality and safety, with about 100 more undergoing assessment.
Those that have not been licensed include meadowsweet for arthritis. Health food shops may continue to sell unlicensed products until stocks ordered before May 1 have run out. However, many shops in Scotland fear the legislation will have an adverse effect.
Ainslie Friel, owner of Hanover Health Foods in Edinburgh, said he had stocked up in advance, but added: Obviously were not very pleased. People are going to be looking overseas on the internet for products, so theres a moral jeopardy there.
Were not pleased. People are going to be looking on the internet for products so there is a moral jeopardy there
Josine Atsma, who recently became the owner of Stirling Health Food Store, said she would have to stop selling products which currently account for around 10% of her business. However, she believes it will just be a hiatus as her main supplier is likely to have more products licensed over the coming months.
The licences are granted, not to generic products such as echninacea, but to individual products by particular manufacturers. Manufacturers must show that each herb has 30 years of traditional use, 15 of which must be in the EU.
Roger Craddock, group legal director at NBTY Europe, owners of Holland & Barrett, said the company had committed to obtaining licences for its products, even though the registration process was extremely complex, hugely time-consuming and expensive.
He welcomed a change allowing medicinal claims to be made on product labels, but said it was a significant drawback that modern herbs which could not show the required 30 years of traditional use would now not be sold.
The Alliance for Natural Health, which campaigns for natural healthcare, points out that among the products licensed so far, well under 100 plant species are included out of a total of more than 1000 commonly used as medicinal herbs. It adds that herbs used in the European tradition dominate those granted licences so far, while not a single herbal remedy used in Ayurveda (from India) and traditional Chinese medicine, has been approved.
The register, managed by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, is being established to comply with an EU directive passed in 2004.
The legislation states that unlicensed herbal medicines may still be used in one instance if prescribed by registered herbal medicines practitioners.
However, as yet, no formal register of herbalists exists in the UK, even though herbalists have been calling for statutory regulation of their profession for more than a decade.
With herbalists facing significant restrictions on their ability to practise unless they are formally registered, Westminster health secretary Andrew Lansley announced in February that the Health Professions Council had been tasked with establishing a statutory register of herbal practitioners, part of a UK-wide unified approach.
The register is likely to be set up in 2012, following consultation by the Scottish Government, and only practitioners reaching certain standards of training will be registered. Those practitioners will then have access to the full range of herbal medicines when prescribing remedies to patients.
Michael McIntyre, chairman of the European Herbal and Traditional Medicines Practitioners Association, said: We are absolutely delighted the Government has now at long last gone for statutory regulation of practitioners, without which patients would lose access to a very wide range of herbal medicines. But some confusion exists over what will happen to herbalists who continue to prescribe unlicensed products during the hiatus between now and the setting up of the register, although they too will be permitted to carry on prescribing unlicensed products until their pre-existing stocks run out.
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