European Health Legislation, Codex And The Sustainability Of Health Care

Brussels has been busy "adjusting" EU food and medicine laws for several years now, bringing increasingly onerous controls for natural products - notably herbs and food supplements. Some observers have criticized these moves as designed to give an unfair advantage to "conventional", pharma-based medicine and will cut across preventive health strategies. Prevention is high on the agenda, but official strategies are largely limited to avoiding and killing off germs. Nutritional intervention, giving people more strength to fight off illness, is not only ignored but is expected to suffer under the new rules.

The new regulations which will go into effect over the next months and years are set to give big business, especially in the pharma and food sectors, notable advantages over the smaller players in the health sector. Yet the public trend is opposite. We see double-digit growth in supplements, herbs and natural health care, while pharmaceutical producers are being blamed for much of the health-care malaise and excessive health care costs lamented by governments.

Dr. Robert Verkerk of the Alliance for Natural Health gives an overview of the various pieces of EU legislation and their expected effects. He also explains how the EU directives tie in to an analogous world wide effort to "regulate" nutritional health intervention by Codex Alimentarius, the UN's food code.

Thanks to Louise Mclean of Zeus Infoservice for forwarding this excellent interview which finally explains the rather complex subject on international health legislation in understandable terms...