Zahra Gor­don

Health Min­is­ter Dr Fuad Khan said in a tele­phone in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian yes­ter­day, that leg­is­la­tion is be­ing draft­ed to reg­u­late the herbal med­i­cine in­dus­try, al­though the draw­ing up and even­tu­al pass­ing of the law could take years. At present, on­ly phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal drugs are reg­u­lat­ed un­der the Food and Drugs Act.

A call by in­de­pen­dent sen­a­tor Sub­has Ramkhelawan in Par­lia­ment last Tues­day has sparked de­bate on the ef­fi­ca­cy and dan­ger of herbal med­i­cines be­ing ad­ver­tised as cures for can­cer, di­a­betes and oth­er ma­jor dis­eases. Some herbal­ists have re­ject­ed Ramkhelawan's sug­ges­tion that they are scam­ming con­sumers.

Un­til the leg­is­la­tion is passed, Khan said that con­sumers can file rel­e­vant com­plaints with the Chem­i­cal, Food and Drugs Di­vi­sion (CFDD). Ad­ver­tis­ing that a prod­uct can cure cer­tain non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble and meta­bol­ic dis­eases is an of­fence un­der Sec­tion 4(1) of the act.

Last year, the UK news­pa­per The Ob­serv­er re­port­ed that the Eu­ro­pean Union had banned hun­dreds of herbal med­i­cines and im­ple­ment­ed strict reg­is­tra­tion and qual­i­ty stan­dards af­ter decades of the in­dus­try be­ing loose­ly gov­erned. Natur­opath and herbal­ist Philip Fran­co be­lieves that many un­trained herbal­ists are dam­ag­ing the rep­u­ta­tion of the en­tire al­ter­na­tive med­i­cine in­dus­try.

As a mem­ber of the Nat­ur­al Al­ter­na­tive Med­i­cine As­so­ci­a­tion (NA­MA) and pro­pri­etor of Nat­ur­al Bal­ance Med­ical Cen­tre, Fran­co has ad­vo­cat­ed the for in­clu­sion of al­ter­na­tive med­i­cine reg­u­la­tion to the Food and Drugs Act. Fran­co, who is li­censed to prac­tise in Cana­da and Aus­tralia, said the lack of reg­u­la­tion has hin­dered his abil­i­ty to im­port qual­i­ty drugs. He says the CFDD needs to pay clos­er at­ten­tion to lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers of herbal med­i­cines.

An­drew Ra­haman, pres­i­dent of the Phar­ma­cy Board, is doubt­ful that the nec­es­sary re­search has been done on lo­cal­ly pro­duced herbal med­i­cines. He al­so ob­served that most lo­cal­ly pro­duced herbal drugs are not pack­aged prop­er­ly, which could have neg­a­tive re­sults on their ef­fec­tive­ness.

He added that some herbs con­tain both harm­ful and ben­e­fi­cial com­po­nents which, if not pu­ri­fied cor­rect­ly, could be dead­ly. How­ev­er, Fran­co not­ed that one of the ben­e­fits of us­ing herbal med­i­cine is the "mul­ti­tude of com­po­nents," which he said lessens the like­li­hood of neg­a­tive side ef­fects.