»

Beware the ‘revolving door’ regulators

It’s been another one of those weeks where natural medicine has come under attack.

A new book by a vocal natural medicine critic Dr Paul Ofitt claims that vitamins and herbal remedies can kill you. These same old arguments by the same old people are getting to be more than tedious and I just have to ask – if vitamins and natural remedies are so harmful, where are all the bodies?

A more rational and thoughtful approach to perceived risks of different kinds of healthcare practices would be ask who is harmed and why? What role does individual vulnerability play? Or, as we recently did with antioxidants, what do we understand about the interplay between certain diseases and certain supplements?

It is also useful to ground ourselves in the reality of how many have died from commonly used natural remedies compared to how may have died as a direct result of conventional medical practices used every single day.

In fact, we did this in 2012 for the UK where the data shows that, compared with the risk of taking food supplements, an individual is around 900 times more likely to die from food poisoning, 1,700 times more likely to die from a bicycling accident and nearly 300,000 times more likely to die from a preventable medical injury during a spell in a UK hospital.

We did a similar exercise for the EU where the data showed that EU citizens taking pharmaceutical drugs run a risk of death from adverse effects that is 123,125 greater than the risk of death from taking a food supplement.

Books like this are frustrating because their conclusions are so often presented without challenge and also because they draw attention from more important issues that genuinely threaten our health and safety, such as the recent conclusion of a three year investigation into revolving door practices between the biotech industry and the European Food Safety Authority.

A report by the European Ombudsman found that in employing a former head of Syngenta (manufactures of bee-killing neonicotinoids and holders of GMO seed patents) as the head of its Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) Unit, EFSA failed to follow its own procedures or thoroughly assess the potential conflict of interest.

Unfortunately the Ombudsman also failed to follow through on his own instincts and submit “a special report on the matter to the European Parliament”.

Revolving door appointments are common practice in the US where so-called independent experts who have financial ties to industry sit on government regulatory panels and are all too happy to approve drugs that may be poorly tested and unsafe.

If  that doesn’t make you quite angry enough check out these startling Venn diagrams that show the multiple links between pharmaceutical companies, biotech, media organisations, financial institutions and more and the US government.

It is, of course, also common practice within European food and  medical regulators and these cosy links taint not just food and farming regulations but also the regulation of natural medicines that have time and time again proved safe and effective.

That revolving door also comes back to smack us on the behind with regard to Dr Ofitt, who in addition to having ties with pharma giant by Merck, has made reported millions from the sale of the rotavirus vaccine RotaTeq, for which he is credited as co-inventor.

Rotavirus is a leading cause of severe diarrhoea in infants and young children. Most children get it at some time or other and it is mostly harmless in the developed world, but can lead to death in undernourished or immune-compromised children in the developing world.

And yet, according to the FDA, compared to placebo, those given the vaccine are more likely to suffer adverse effects including, ironically, diarrhoea as well as vomiting and ear infection.

Ofitt is, not surprisingly, an enthusiastic advocate of vaccination, dismisses any possible link between vaccination and autism, and has gone on record with his view that,  in theory, each infant could take up to 10,000 vaccinations at one time without harm. He has also been an advisor to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

Round and round and round we go…

Who can we trust? It’s getting harder to know.

Pat Thomas, Editor