http://www.communicationagents.com/sepp/legislation.htm en-us sepp@lastrega.com Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:45:31 GMT http://www.communicationagents.com/sepp/2008/08/30/from_avoiding_deficiency_to_optimal_health_rda_focus_must_change.htm Nutrition is of course what happens when we eat, but there is a very scientific side to nutrition that counts infinitesimal quantities of certain vital substances. Without these vital 'vitamins' and minerals we just can't survive. Our bodies fall ill and refuse to function. Those are serious deficiency diseases like scurvy, a sure killer that comes after weeks and months of little or no vitamin C. Nothing like an orange just from the tree - Image: Sepp The quantities of nutrients that allow us to avoid deficiency diseases are called the RDA - recommended dietary allowances and, more recently, RDI or reference daily intakes. Much research however has shown that RDAs cannot protect against the slow onset of degenerative diseases which have become major killers in our Western societies. It would seem, therefore, that lawmaking should put less emphasis on RDAs and more on a measure of optimal health by nutrition. Two Dutch scientists, Dr Jaap Hanekamp and Prof Aalt Bast have published an article where they argue for a change in focus of the RDA from avoiding known and certain deficiencies to actually providing the optimal amounts of nutrients for good health. Wish the European Commission and national health authorities would pay attention. Here are some excerpts and a link to the article in full.... Legislation Sepp Hasslberger Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:45:31 GMT http://www.communicationagents.com/sepp/2008/08/12/codex_alimentarius_globalizing_food_and_health.htm Codex Alimentarius, a UN World Health Organization initiative charged with working out standards for foods, has come under public criticism for lending its clout to the big industry game of establishing a global food market. While a global market does not seem bad at first sight, it is a very fragile market. Recent increases in grain prices led to hunger and food riots in poor countries. A global market is an easily controlled market and it is the direct antithesis of food security. The future of a country's food supply should be one of the first considerations when establishing food policy. Yet, Codex and the World Trade Organization give it no thought. The agenda of global "free trade" is good for multinational companies, but it is less good for local food production. in many of the developing countries, local agriculture has been ruined by cheap imports and those countries have become dependent on imported staples which they now find cost double or triple the price they first paid. Genetically modified organisms and a concentration of seed producers into a near monopoly situation further lock in that control mechanism. Codex is right in the middle of this through its strategic task of drafting international food laws. When Codex Alimentarius says genetically modified foods or certain chemical additives are ok, it becomes very difficult for any country to prove they are damaging to health, or to simply be cautious on behalf of its population. In recent years, the issue of Nutrition and Health was taken up by Codex. The Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses discussed food supplements and passed a guideline. Unfortunately, like in the case of GM foods and additives, the outcome was less than consumer friendly. In Codex, industry always wins, and in this case, the interests of the pharmaceutical industry to suppress the competing health interventions of cheap nutrition-based remedies and prevention, took a huge step forward. How Codex works and what happened on the supplements issue is the subject of this article.... Legislation Sepp Hasslberger Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:41:53 GMT http://www.communicationagents.com/sepp/2008/05/07/canada_bill_c51_threatens_natural_health_products.htm On April 8th, Canada’s Minister of Health, Tony Clement, introduced Bill C-51 into the House of Commons. If passed, that bill will drastically alter the current Food and Drugs Act, and that will be bad news for many Canadians. According to an article on the Common Ground website, "expectations are that if Federal Bill C-51 is passed, around 75 percent of new applications will most likely fail to meet new requirements." Canada has traditionally been liberal, favoring availability of nutrient-containing products to people wishing to use vitamins and minerals for their preventive or even curative health needs. But some time in the 90s, a world wide campaign was started to curtail the use of nutritional supplements in health care in favor of pharmaceutical medicines. The US FDA's intention to limit vitamin dosages to RDA levels was blocked by an overwhelming consumer driven campaign which eventually resulted in liberal legislation, the so-called Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) in 1993/94. In Europe, the early 90s saw the first attempt to pass a food supplements law, which after some delay was issued in 2004 as the Food Supplements Directive. Codex Alimentarius started talking about limiting supplements in 1994. More recently, Australia and New Zealand were supposed to harmonize in the direction of Australia's restrictive model which considers supplements "therapeutic goods" or medicines. New Zealand has successfully resisted so far. In Canada, there was resistance to change and finally a parliamentary committee was charged with finding a way to control supplements. Shawn Buckley's Common Ground article gives some specifics on what happened before the introduction of the recent bill: On November 4, 1998, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health tabled its report, titled “Natural Health Products: A New Vision”. The report contained 53 recommendations, all of which were accepted by the Government on March 2, 1999. The first recommendation read that "Health Canada, in conjunction with a new separate Natural Health Products Expert Advisory Committee (EAC) should set out an appropriate definition of natural health products (NHPs) and amend the Food and Drugs Act accordingly." However, for expediency, a regulatory definition was created and implemeted instead of amending the law; Natural Health Products (NHPs) would be considered as drugs under the Food and Drugs Act. In Health Canada's page of Frequently Asked Questions, the following response was given for the question of why the Act was not amended: "While creating another category distinct from both food and drugs was considered, an amendment at the level of the Act would have been necessary. Due to the timelines and legislative process required for a change of this magnitude, it was decided that natural health products would be considered drugs under the Act, but with a set of regulations specific to NHPs." In effect, Health Canada is stating that they chose not to implement the direction of the government, but there was a good reason - amending the Act would take a long time and be a lot of work. However, on April 8, 2008, the Minister of Health introduced Bill C-51, An act to amend the Food and Drugs Act. This legislation introduces new definitions, including a new product category called "therapeutic products", a term that encompasses drugs, medical devices and cells used for therapeutic purposes. Despite there being an opportunity to amend the Act, an opportunity to amend definitions in the Act and include a decade-old Government directive to include Natural Health Products as a separate legal category, drafters of the bill chose not to. The question remains: why? In effect, parliamentary deliberations were held in Canada and the results published, but the recommendations were disregarded. Did they simply not fit the broader agenda which commenced in the early 90s, of doing away with supplements as a competing approach to pharmaceuticals world wide in public health systems?... Legislation Sepp Hasslberger Wed, 7 May 2008 15:53:43 GMT http://www.communicationagents.com/sepp/2008/04/03/eu_scientific_committee_mercury_in_dental_fillings_no_danger.htm On 15 January, Reuters reported about a European scientific Committee report stating that Amalgams pose no health risk to the human nervous system. Mercury vapor escaping from extracted tooth subjected to heat (from this video) The report was prepared by the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) which is made up of external experts. According to Ulla Danielsen, a Danish journalist, the committee consists of seven members, four of which are dentists and have declared to have connections with the dental industry. The report is available in PDF format from the EU Committe's website. SCENIHR recognises that dental amalgam is an effective restorative material and, from the perspectives of longevity, the mechanical performance and health economics, may be considered the material of choice for some restorations in posterior teeth, including replacement therapy for existing amalgam fillings. However, because dental amalgam is neither tooth-coloured nor adhesive to remaining tooth tissues, its use has been decreasing in recent years and the alternative tooth-coloured filling materials have become increasingly more popular. This rather upbeat assessment of mercury dental fillings however seems to be contradicted by what is generally known about the toxicity of the highly volatile metal, which the Committee acknowledges with the following words: Mercury is the major metallic element used in dental amalgam. It is recognized that mercury in general does constitute a toxicological hazard, with reasonably well defined characteristics for the major forms of exposure, involving elemental mercury, organic and inorganic mercury compounds. It is accepted that the reduction in use of mercury in human activity would be beneficial both for the decrease in indirect human exposure and environmental considerations. The report is clearly industry-friendly and - contrary to what the Committee's name would seem to indicate - is leaving the "emerging health risks" of mercury unexplored. This has led to protests by a number of scientists, medical doctors and associations including the French association "No to dental mercury", Vera Stejskal, Professor of Immunology at the University of Stockholm, Sweden, the International Academy of Oral Medicine & Toxicology, Dr. Joachim Mutter of the Institute for Environmental Medicine in Freiburg, Germany, the Swedish Chemicals Agency (KEM) and the European Academy for Environmental Medicine in Würzburg, Germany. It also is worthy of note that the report appears to be completely out of tune with the European Commission's strategy to gradually eliminate mercury from the environment by reducing production and instituting strict controls on how mercury must be eliminated. The EU has a toxic hazards strategy to eliminate mercury, but according to the SCENIHR report there is nothing wrong with putting the poison in people's mouths. That just doesn't make any sense! A public protest asking that the EU report be withdrawn and that a new expert group consisting of both competent and impartial experts be appointed to rewrite it, is available at the website of the Luxembourg based association AKUT. Danish journalist Ulla Danielsen has more to say...... Health Sepp Hasslberger Thu, 3 Apr 2008 18:45:54 GMT http://www.communicationagents.com/sepp/2008/02/25/will_europe_restrict_herbs_vegetable_extracts.htm The European Union does not believe in its citizens' ability to choose nutrients wisely. This very paternalistic view finds expression in a series of restrictive laws that aim at regulating what can be sold as a healthy food to supplement our daily menu with vitamins, minerals, herbs or vegetable concentrates. The European Food Supplements Directive, which was approved in 2002, provides a "framework" for regulating the nutrients we may add to our meals. The details on coming restrictions for vitamins and minerals that the directive envisions have been delayed for years. Neither the lists of "nutrient sources" nor the dosages to be allowed in pills and capsules have been agreed, six years after the directive was first issued. Yet the Commission is already busy on its next step. According to the Alliance for Natural Health, herbs and vegetable extracts are now in line for restrictive assessment. The alliance which represents consumers, doctors, shopkeepers and some producers is concerned that large numbers of plant-derived products or botanicals, which pose no risk to human health, and have numerous benefits, will be forced through an onerous risk assessment procedure. The proposed procedure is likely to be cost-prohibitive for smaller companies that have been the main pioneers and innovators within the natural health industry. Dr Robert Verkerk, executive director of the Alliance for Natural Health says that since our western diet more and more lacks the needed variety and we are not eating enough of the recommended vegetables and fruits, at least we should be able to supplement what we eat with more concentrated foods of high nutritional value. According to Verkerk, "botanical supplementation is an important tool for the enhancement of people’s diets. It makes no sense to limit freedom of choice for those who choose to take responsibility for their health.” Some widely used natural essences such as eucalyptus, tea tree, thyme and citronella can no longer be used in natural insect repellents and personal deodorants, as a result of another European directive that regulates what are called "biocidal products". So the fear that many of the herbs and vegetable extracts we find today in food supplements are in jeopardy of being removed by heavy handed intervention is not just idle speculation. If the Industry does not work to achieve a fairer regulatory regime, which accepts those botanical products that have been safely used for a long time, says Verkerk, a fate similar to these natural essences could befall many of the vegetable extracts that are used in food supplements today. I might add that industry can do little without the backing of consumers. People who rely on these supplements to better the nutrient density of their foods better wake up as well and make their views known. The politicians seem so far removed from the reality of life today that they could make any law, as long as it helps Big Pharma, which they see as an important industry, and doesn't concern their own families directly. So wives, friends and children, clue in your politician husbands, friends and fathers ... (hint, hint)!... Legislation Sepp Hasslberger Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:59:41 GMT http://www.communicationagents.com/sepp/2007/11/19/codex_alimentarius_moves_closer_to_european_blueprint_on_supplements.htm Last week, the Committee for Nutrition and Dietary Foods of Codex Alimentarius, an international food standard setting body, met in Germany, discussing matters ranging from nutrients to baby foods, from sustainable health care to the promotion of healthy foods. The National Health Federation (NHF), an international non governmental organization representing consumers and practitioners in the natural health area, was there to keep tabs and intervene in defense of health freedom. Codex Nutrition Committee meeting November 2007 - Image: Scott Tips elaborated by Sepp. The three NHF delegates could speak, but only national health authorities really have a say, and only when it pleases the chairman of the meeting, Dr Rolf Grossklaus, who is also the head of the ultra-conservative - meaning they're opposed to supplements - German Federal Risk Assessment Institute. Accordingly, progress was all in the direction of more control, tighter limits, and less freedom to choose for you and me. It's the European model that is being followed, according to the NHF. No wonder, that model was worked out by the Germans and it's being exported to the US next. The FDA seems content - they have always wanted a good reason to clamp down on those nasty supplements. Vitamins have become a mainstream health enhancer and a real thorn in the eye of the pharmaceutical industry, which the FDA is set up to protect. Here is what the NHF says about the meeting:... Legislation Sepp Hasslberger Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:02:56 GMT http://www.communicationagents.com/sepp/2007/10/31/eu_commissioner_kyprianou_shrugs_off_consumer_concerns_over_nutrients.htm The European Union is currently deliberating how to limit dosages of vitamins and minerals in commerce. The move is mandated by the European food supplements directive, which came into force in 2004. The directive regulates the commerce of nutrient-dense food supplements but full implementation is still years away, expected to take hold by 2010. Temporary permission for hundreds of specific forms of vitamins and minerals used in supplements for decades, for which 'dossiers' were required to be submitted, will run out in December 2009. The deliberations on dosage limits are expected to come to a conclusion that same year. Apparently Kyprianou's office has received a huge number of letters from concerned consumers writing from all over Europe, who do not like the prospect of having to switch from vitamin C to lemon juice, and the Commission feels that some kind of a response is needed. In a letter to the Irish Association of Health Stores, sent on behalf of Kyprianou, Paula Pinho states that Kyprianou "has already received a serious number of similar letters [about the food supplements directive]. Therefore, it says, "the Cabinet of Commissioner Kyprianou, in cooperation with DG SANCO, has decided to provide a detailed answer to all these letters through Internet." Carrots on prescription - Artwork by Emma Holister. The Commissioner's 'detailed reply' however does not address specific consumer concerns. It reads like a plea for people to stop bothering the Commission while it does its important work. Well worn phrases like supplements are "intended for supplementing the normal diet" and they should be "safe and provide a wide choice to consumers" are little consolation to those of us who use nutrients at higher than normal doses to keep illness away and support an active and healthy life style. The Commission's 'discussion paper' on dosages and the responses to this call for input from member states and stakeholders - industry, trade and consumers - but not the letters from individual consumers, are linked from that same page. This episode recalls an earlier reply to consumers, given by the previous EU Commissioner, David Byrne, during the passage of the food supplements directive, which similarly assured us that nothing untoward was going to happen - that the new regulations were going to be all for the best, that consumers would have a wide choice and be safe in the knowledge of being 'protected' by the authorities. If the objective of the European Commission really was to provide "a wide choice" of (safe) supplements, why can't they leave good enough alone and turn their legislative fervor to other, more worthwhile targets? Supplement safety is not problematic, as evidenced by actual statistics. If anyone took their legislative work seriously, they would act according to the maxim: "If it isn't broken, don't fix it". On the other hand, registered medicines are tightly controlled and patented and have given rise to a multi-mega profitable industry, yet they kill - in the United States alone - over 100.000 people every year. There is no question that they are unsafe. Now here would be a fruitful field of endeavor for our busy European legislators. Why fuss over the dosages of nutrients that haven't killed anyone in decades, when the very industry that is supposed to prevent and treat illness is so far off the track? All the Commissioner has to say is that food supplements "are intended for supplementing the normal diet rather than having therapeutic effects". So it's ok for medicines to kill, but supplements better not have any curative effects - that would impinge negatively on the monopoly of medicines. Could it be that the medical/pharmaceutical industry has regulators and legislators firmly in its pocket? Is the very industry that has become a leading cause of injury and death directing legislators' attention towards the supposed dangers of those nasty nutrients, to hide the very real skeletons in its own closets?... Health Sepp Hasslberger Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:36:56 GMT http://www.communicationagents.com/sepp/2007/10/24/proposed_european_nutrient_safety_levels_not_fit_for_purpose.htm The Alliance for Natural Health, a group campaigning for sustainable health care in Europe, states in a newly released paper, that the European Commission's proposed model for limiting the amounts of nutrients allowed to be sold in food supplements is seriously flawed. Dr Robert Verkerk, the scientific director of the Alliance says: “The Commission claims that its methods are scientific but we have found that they do not stand up to scientific scrutiny”. Billed as an effort to protect consumer health, the limitations under consideration are set to seriously restrict options for active prevention of ill health through nutrition. The European directive on food supplements mandates that a decision be made which of the vitamins and minerals we find in supplements should have maximum dosage limits and what those limits should eventually be. It is expected that the levels will be finalised in 2009 and early indications are that Member States such as the UK, Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland, that have until now allowed relatively high levels, might have to face big reductions in dosages. “You know something is wrong when they are thinking of limiting the dose of beta-carotene to the amount you’d find in just two carrots, and restricting selenium to the amount present in less than two brazil nuts. There seems to have been no attempt to test the models against real data. If the Commission really believed these doses might be the highest safe doses, why aren’t they screaming for warning labels to be put on bags of carrots and brazil nuts”, adds Verkerk. Dr Damien Downing, who is President of the British Society of Ecological Medicine and Editor of the peer reviewed scientific Journal of Nutritional & Environmental Medicine, says: “It is the multiple use of safety or uncertainty factors that further compounds the reduction of levels from so-called Safe Upper Levels, that are often overly cautious to begin with. The resulting maximum levels, should these be implemented in law, would prevent many consumers from ingesting the levels of vitamins and minerals needed for optimal health and would also greatly interfere with consumer choice.” The Alliance's position paper includes a statement of how a proper, scientifically valid and proportionate risk management model should look. That of course leaves the question open of why we need to "manage the risks" of supplements in the first place. These nutrient containing pills have been found to be much safer than normal, everyday foods, let alone medicines which are specifically formulated to fight disease and increase health. By rights, there should be no talk of limiting nutrient availability because there is no problem of any appreciable size. People aren't overdosing on nutrients. And worse yet, limits on nutrient dosages are likely make a negative contribution to public health. People who supplement nutrients to stay in good health today may find they can no longer do so when the European Commission is done legislating against vitamins and minerals. The Alliance for Natural Health brings together scientists, medical doctors, integrative practitioners, lawyers and consumers, as well as suppliers of food supplements and other health foods, as a means of working towards the development of sustainable approaches to healthcare. Their critique and position paper on the European Commission's proposals is summarized below:... Health Sepp Hasslberger Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:22:57 GMT http://www.communicationagents.com/sepp/2007/10/15/codex_alimentarius_will_eu_laws_become_world_standard.htm In a recent article, The Economist discusses How the European Union is becoming the world's chief regulator. The article says the EU regulatory framework is in the process of becoming "world standard". The Economist quotes an unnamed US official: One American official says flatly that the EU is “winning” the regulatory race, adding: “And there is a sense that that is their precise intent.” He cites a speech by the trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, claiming that the export of “our rules and standards around the world” was one source of European power. Noting that EU regulations are often written with the help of European incumbents, the official also claims that precaution can cloak “plain old-fashioned protectionism in disguise”. While the prime example in the Economist's article is a fine imposed on Microsoft for bullying its competitors, the fact that EU regulations are copied in the rest of the world holds true in many sectors of the economy. In the area of nutrition and healthcare, EU legislative activity has led to several new pieces of legislation that are - seen in their context - potentially disastrous for public health. The directives and regulations discussed in the linked document prepared by the Alliance for Natural Health diminish individual choice in health and prevention, while preserving the profitability of big industry and indeed slanting the 'playing field' in favor of the largest competitors. Codex Alimentarius, the United Nation's international food standard-setting body, has also been discussing food supplements, one of the subjects of the recent EU health legislation. Codex Alimentarius Commission meeting (2007) Image: Sepp The Codex guidelines, adopted at the Codex Commission's plenary session in July 2005 here in Rome, are little more than a copy of the European Directive adopted some years before. This seems to confirm the view expressed in the Economist's article, according to which the EU is "winning the regulatory race". Americans are proud of their freedoms, particularly in the area of health and nutrition. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) put food supplements firmly in the food category, preventing the FDA from regulating nutrients as either additives or medicines, a practice which previously had led to much friction between the FDA and the producers and consumers of supplements. To the chagrin of the FDA and the pharmaceutical interests that influence its policies, supplements have enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth since the passage of DSHEA. Perhaps that is why the FDA is now working to harmonize US law and administrative practice for supplements with Codex guidelines and with other countries' more restrictive regulations. The Life Extension Foundation laments this trend in a recent article: The anti-American FDA is actively seeking to undermine U.S. laws and harmonize our dietary supplement laws with Mexico and Canada. This is being done through the Trilateral Cooperation Charter – an illegal agreement set up with health regulatory agencies in Mexico and Canada. It is part of the campaign towards a North American Union, one which would be a catastrophe for health freedom in this country as dietary supplement laws in Canada and Mexico are far more restrictive than in the U.S. The FDA would also like to harmonize our dietary supplement laws with the evolving international standards set by Codex, thus branding therapeutic nutrition as dangerous and risky and needing to be sold by Big Pharma or removed from the market altogether (if it competes with a blockbuster category of drugs). Codex is planning to use the same proteomics and biomarker technology that will be used by the FDA’s Critical Path Initiative to remove therapeutic dietary supplements from the international market and force their policies on America, thereby superseding the sovereignty of American law on threat of trade sanctions. The FDA fully supports draconian Codex guidelines to regulate dietary supplements and is working with the Germans to concoct technology to brand nutrients as drugs. Will Americans be able to maintain their nutritional freedoms in the face of pressure coming from both, international and domestic agencies? It appears that the problem may no longer be only American - there is an international trend of using "precaution" to brand nutrients as more dangerous than the pharmaceutical drugs that are killing hundreds of thousands every year. To counter the trend, we may have to look at its origins: a conservative view of nutrition rooted in certain European nations that never had a culture of nutrient-mediated prevention and healing, coupled with a view that the only remedies for good health are pharmaceutical drugs. Research and education will be essential to meet the challenge. Research to find and better define the effects of nutrients in prevention and healing, education to bring the conservative Europeans up to speed on how useful nutrients can be in prevention and maintenance of good health. With food supplements, we have an extremely cost effective and very safe tool to better public health. Why not use it to its full extent? As a friend recently said, Europe has really no need for all these complicated regulations. The Community has a principle - the free movement of goods and services - which would be quite sufficient on its own to ensure a working internal market. That means people could determine whether to use supplements to stock up on nutrients and to what extent they want to do that. The Germans and the French could buy their supplements in England or the Netherlands, if they weren't locally available. But apparently some governments believe they have to control every last aspect of our lives, and the EU bureaucracy seems to agree.... Health Sepp Hasslberger Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:33:51 GMT http://www.communicationagents.com/sepp/2007/10/08/should_we_discard_herbal_medicine_unless_provided_by_pharma.htm An examination of three randomized trials involving individualized herbal remedies was sufficient for two researchers to suggest that herbal medicine should be discarded. Not those herbal extracts that are provided by pharmaceutical companies, to be sure, but those mixtures of individual herbs prepared by practitioners following Chinese, Indian or other herbal traditions. The study was reported in the UK press and is drawing many comments from readers, largely in favor of herbal and medical diversity. The Daily Mail got its headline slightly wrong when saying Herb cures that 'do you more harm than good', after all, what was examined was not the safety of herbal remedies but their efficacy. The sideswipe on the safety of herbs seems no more than a gratuitous slur. The researchers' complaint is with "Individualised treatments, used in Chinese, Ayurvedic and Western herbal medicine" and with the fact that of the three trials they examined only one showed the herbal remedies to be superior to placebo. The Daily Mail gives away some of the agenda when reporting: "Britain is reviewing the laws on the regulation of tailored herbal treatments, but Dr Canter wants them banned, even at the risk of a backlash from Chinese or Indian communities." adding that "In some countries doctors practise phytotherapy, which uses extracts from a single plant and closely follows the principles of pharmacology." So phytotherapy, using "extracts from a single plant" that "closely follow the principles of pharmacology" are all right, while individual attention from a herbalist is outright dangerous. Presumably the researchers who came up with this "study" are practicing phytotherapy... The Telegraph ( Herbal medicine 'risks harmful side-effects' ) and The Guardian ( Herbalists' cocktails may do more harm than good, say researchers ) carry similar stories calling for a ban on individualised herbal remedies. In The Guardian's article, we read: "The UK drug regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA), has been looking at herbal medicine, and statutory regulation for herbalists is imminent. Other areas where changes may be made are in manufacturing and import licences." Call me biased, but could it be that the "study" involving a total of three research papers and a well-known antagonist of alternative medicine, Prof Edzard Ernst, has been thrown together in a great hurry for the express purpose of influencing the imminent new law (statutory regulation...) for the herbalist profession? There are many interesting comments from readers on the newspapers' sites. One reader's letter and comment on the study that was sent to the papers carrying the story did not make it through to actual publication. It does however provide a glimpse of the interests that could be hiding behind this story ... perhaps it is all a question of money.... Health Sepp Hasslberger Mon, 8 Oct 2007 16:22:13 GMT