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Are you satisfied with the government's food and drugs watchdogs? How much trust do you hold in what you eat and the drugs and medicines you take?

Please keep your responses brief and to the point.

This topic is now closed - this is what you said.

Given the multinational drug industry has been trying to restrict the sale of natural health products to doctors prescriptions in Europe and overseas countries, the very late action of the TGA with regards to Pan seems to fit the same global pattern. Highly hypocritical given the approvals it grants for harmful food additives aggravating behaviour disorders in children. If the public thinks the drug industry is squeaky clean most would be very surprised to discover the patent rights of the world?s big profit drugs are actually owned by the same chemical giants which manufacture the world?s toxic pesticides. The questions, that remain unanswered, are how many serious human diseases are caused by long term exposure to toxic pesticides & chemicals, and how much of drug company profits are the result of ?captive business? well serviced by doctors?

Rex Warren

Can we all be reminded that the product that was proven to be dangerous was Travacalm, which is NOT classified as a Vitamin, Mineral or Herbal product. Travacalm is an over the counter DRUG with synthetic compounds not natural compounds. There have been no cases of illhealth or side effects from taking the Recalled Vitamins & Minerals over the past 9 months. The Issue is an ethical one : Greed and Profit motive have no place in our health. Pharmaceutical companies take heed we, the public want our Vitamins & Supplements and we want them made with care, integrity and honour.

Paul Jirwander

Face the facts please everyone. Independent regulation does not exist in this country. Howard and his mates have been filling the country's regulators with members of the industries they are supposed to regulate. This is supposed to offer those board members an insight into the industry from the company's perspective. Unfortunately, all it does is enable those companies that are breaking the rules to avoid being caught until they can change the rules themselves. A classic case of this is when Howard put food manufacturers on the board of the newly formed FSANZ (formerly ANZFA), the government body that is supposed to protect the consumer by ensuring a safe food supply in this country. Just becuase they are regulating the very industry in which they make their dollars, that they make regular and generous donations to the Liberal Party, or that they are personal (or new) friends of the Prime Minister doesn't mean that they won't do the best thing for the consumer. But then again, I've seen the flying pigs and they DO exist! Trust me.


My 14 year old daughter was perscribed primose oil for a skin condition, six weeks on she suffered a seizure in a swimming pool and spent five days in a coma. There is evidence that links evening primose and seizures. Everything natual is not always O.k. and therefore goverment regulators must be responsible for portecting comsumers. Not one
supplier that I canvassed was aware of the connection between seizures and primose oil. My daughter had never suffered from seizures before this accident and has not since. Kaye

Kaye Poulos

Phil: You really need to grow up in terms of your absolute faith in prescribed medicines from the big multinational pharmaceutical companies.

Once their patents run out on one drug used to treat an ailment, then they will simply develop a new one. The new one does not have to be better than the old one, all they need to show is that it is better than taking nothing. Throw into the equation that billions of dollars that they spend in marketing and kickbacks to doctors and more often than not you are better off with the old medicines.

I am certainly not blaming you general GP because they certainly cannot spend the billions on research to determine whether the old or new drug is better. The regulatory autorities here and in the US really need to do something to ensure that new medicine that come out are actually better than the old ones rather than just an attempt by the multinational to shift the market from the older (but more effective) drug to the new (less effective) one that they still hold the patent on.

Wake up and smell the ethanol...

Who is in charge of health inspections of food outlets and restaurants? Every day, wherever I buy my lunch from, the person serving me takes my money with their gloved hand, and when they've finished serving me, proceeds to make the next sandwich with that hand. Not to mention brushing their face and hair, wearing rings, etc, etc.

Very unsatisfied with food preparation hygiene

We must guard against regulatory control of natural remedies. Conspiracy theorists would say that the real reason behind this event is the purposeful vilification of alternative medicines. The name given to natural remedies is "Complimentary Remedies". This choice of name is designed to condition the minds of the unwarey into a belief that natural medicines only compliment the drugs peddled by the Pharmaceutical Companies. I can attribute to that being untrue with an example of successful treatment of an eye condition with natural herbal remedies were drugs prescribed by three eye specialists failed miserably and burned my eyes. We want qualitative controls not regulatory controls and the higher costs and taxes for Government that accompany them.

Herbal Watchdog

As a former employee of both the Australia New Zealand Food Authority and CSIRO I am surprised that we are not experiencing more outbreaks of serious illnesses or death caused by our food supply. Regulation of our food, at board level, is conducted by members of the food manufacturing and/or production industry who have obvious conflicts of interest when it comes to approving food or food standards for consumption by the Australian public. At the scientific level of food regulation, ANZFA (now FSANZ)are basically reliant upon scientific analysis and results from the manufacturers of that food, or by that food's use in other countries. They do this without sufficient independent data on injury, illness or long-tern effects. In my experience at CSIRO I have discovered that some scientists and staff have little regard for quality assurance, following legislative guidelines on security (especially with GMOs) and are more concerned with the economic worth of the final product than with the quality or safety of the product. With the requirement of finding funds outside the public purse, I feel that commercial interests are now driving CSIRO research, particularly with GMOs. I know that many of the scientific staff also feel that their work is being compromised by commercial partners or interests. It is little wonder that we now have an outbreak of the wheat streak mosaic virus from CSIRO that threatens Australia's wheat crop - they are an accident waiting to happen. What will happen when one of their GMO's gets loose? With manufacturers and producers of food, the basic stuff of life, are allowed to go as unregulated and unsupervised as the are, with this government supporting a version of self-regulation using official agencies, then we will have more catastophic disasters in the future. As always, with this government, it is the almighty dollar that drives the industry, and where the dollar rules, safeguards for the public fall away.

Be careful what you eat!

I'm a 16 yr old who attends achool i must say that i am not fully aware of the situation. I would just like to have an opportunity to express my views on the current crises.I think that what the government is doing is alright. I trust the food i eat and can honestly say that the food and medicne i take is of the highest standards possible. Here some people are complaining that we should tighten up the food and drugs watchdogs, while there are people in third world countries who eat and drink contaminated food and water every day. This is a sign that the people criticsing the government, are self centered pigs. We should be grateful that we have access to healthy foods and medicines that will keep us from being sick, because a greater number of people in the world don't. thank you for giving me the chance to express what i feel.

Danile Stephen

Absolutely dissatisfied, governments who allow multinational companies to turn their toxic waste into fertiliser and don't have to label what is in it can't be trusted. Government run watchdogs are not to be trusted at any time. Watchdogs should be independently run by cross sections of private people.


If all the money that's spent on supplements went in to making clean food more available/affordable we wouldn't be open to such catashtrophes. I mean, look at since Woolies got into the equation. A joke. It's depletion of minerals due to pesticide and cold-storage that has us all on supplements. It's postulated that depletion of omega-3 oils in vegetables due to modern production techniques that accounts for the world-wide depression epedimec (ah, but prozac works dude). Watchdogs? How come the price of fruit and veg doesn't come down when those products are in season? What about those tomatoes that are nice and red only when you cut them they're rock hard. Is someone putting dye in the water? Or the rock-hard peaches that look remarkably ripe. What a feat of engineering that is! And the potatoes? Don't get me started. 4 types (washed, brushed, scraped and ruined). You don't wash potatoes and you don't expose them to light, yet there they are nice and clean under a mini-sun. And you certainly don't advertise potatoes as new when they're already sprouting. And mangoes. THey have to be rotten before they drop the price. And then there's berocca. The only reason you need that for a hangover is because of all the chemicals in the beer. Do yourself a favour, spend the extra money on German beer. The 1516 purity law still protects the German beer drinker by ensuring that only Barley, Hops and Water go into beer. Now that's a Doberman of a watchdog, not the Chihuaha we've got whimpering under the table here.

The Subjective Observer

I suspect that the regulatory agencies are poorly organised to say the least. It seems the older i get the fussier I get about what I eat and taking a look at the food preparation areas of many restaurants and cafes makes me turn green sometimes.

I was unfortunate enough to get food poisoning once, I was laid out for more than two days but foolishly i never reported it (why are we so slow to recognise food poisoning, instead thinking we have "the 'flu?"

Clearly there are not enough inspections done, and there should be mandatory audits of food outlets, requirements for dating of ALL products, more mandatory publicly viewable thermomters, and more public information on safe food preparation and storage. The number of people I meet who don't even know what temperatures comprise the "danger zone" etc - and these are people in their homes...

Things don't appear any better in the food preparation and retail industry, it seems obvious that compulsory training, auditing and refresher courses are the answer.

As for the herbal/natural medicine debate, there have been some excellent points made - I personally would like to see the "de-crystallizing" and "de-dolphining" of alternative medicine with the imposition of more regulations to bring the industry into line with the rest of the medical profession.

Problem is there is always some argument over alternative therapies about whether they work or not, but I would like to see the government spend a considerable amount of money on testing and assessing alternative therapies and perhaps affording them a little protection from vested conventional interests, so Australia could become a world leader in medicine that embraces the BEST treatments, not the most conventional or unconventional - I think the situation is far too politicised and people need to consider whether what they are taking is done so out of faith in one system or another, or whether the treatment is the best available based on research.

Let's be a world leader on this, and put some charlatans and snake oil merchants out of business...



I have four simple words for those who supposedly must consume vitamins and minerals to maintain a healthy body - Healthy diet and exercise".

Back in the bad old days before factory produced foods and five minutes dinners, when a person didn't have access to pharmacies and the like, there was no such thing as a unbalanced diet.

People received their daily intake of vitamins and minerals from the very foods they ate - there were no vegetarians, people were not allergic to certain types of additives and preservatives. WHY??? Because there were no preservatives (other than salt) or additives to enhance the flavour or colour.

And as far as natural remedies go they were exactly that - 100% natural. Not mass produced but either dispensed from a jar, bottle or sack kept in a dry place or gather from the fields and personally prepared.

eat healthy, think healthy, live healthy and you will actually be healthy. You will have no need of the vitamins that your doctor or some former has been athlete insists you so desparately need.

Stefan Redford

Two questions:
Why do some people keep telling us we need less and less taxation & regulation, then complain when publicly-funded bodies don't have the resources to deal with their job (e.g. APRA &c, &c), and user-paid bodies dance to the piping of the payers (e.g. building inspectors)?;
Why is this debate sliding towards the efficacy of alternative/complementary/herbal medicine when the problem is very poor practices at a manufacturer who made both those & 'standard' non-prescription over-the-counter products?

With luck, the TGA will get a bit more support & will also learn some lessons from this, but they seem to have been doing their job. I have similar hopes for the financial regulatory bodies, but less optimism.

The problems with Travacalm are from hyoscine (aka scopolamine as found in Datura), a standard motion sickness drug. 'Natural' remedies, if they do work & effects aren't just from placebo, have to be treated with as much care as 'artificial' ones.

[Disclosure: Trained in biology - BSc (Hons) & worked for 5 years in medical/pharmacological research before brain draining to a service industry with better pay & stability. Have no strong ideological support of 'alternatives', but not totally agin them either.]

Merrill Pye

With Mr Selim having such a checkered past you would think that the watchdogs would be watching more closely. As far as punishment goes we are far to lenient and that will not deter anyone. Just watch how a fall guy will be found. In six months he will be back in business under a new name making more millions.

Those responsible at Pan - starting from the top - should be severely punished ... these greedy and irresponsible people.


I have read a few comments here about the terrible "Drug Companies" that are only around to make money.

Consider the alternative...

If drug companies are not allowed to market and make money then they won't research new drugs.

Your choice: no new medicines vs. accept drug companies are here to make a profit.


I believe the multivitamin industry should be come down on, really hard, for its untested claims. Like 'Bob Moore' wrote, if you want to be healthy then the first thing to watch is your diet. And you simply cannot make up for a crap diet by swilling pills or filling up on herbal remedies. Eating better, with a mix of vegies and loads of fruit, is the ticket. Add a few yummy vegetarian dishes each week and you'll never need a multivitamin again. You'll enjoy your tucker and save heaps of money on pills that have no tested health benefits.

Tim Eager

Someone from this forum suggested we check what we put into our mouths ourselves, and that we shouldn't need regulators to check them for us. Okay, that fine....So, could you please tell me how you are going to test each bit of food you put in your mouth? What are you going to be testing for?

Let's take the case of drinking water. Please let me know what test(s) you have in mind and how you are going to perform the test(s).


Australia has hit the nail on an issue that less developed countries have been practising for centuries, ie. lack of reliable regulatory watchdogs around herbal medicines. Most of the herbs in China have been passed down through generations, perhaps modified.... and not surprisingly, can also be detriment to one's health. Even something as simple as drinking a herbal potion meant to cure the common cold, can make your heart race unnaturally. People tend to think that because it is herbal, that it does not contain side effects, or adverse effects. To this date, there has not been a well-rounded study around the effects and benefits of such "natural" remedies.


The TGA has know for years about the problems with PAN, but did nothing, why? Try to see who the shareholders are and you will understand.

Blackmores talk about there production facilites, but I did not know they have one, I trust they are imported products and get them filled next door. But where is the TLC testing of each batch checking that product is what it state to be as well as they don't contain and heavy metals or posion that was used from the importing countries. I guess the TGA need have much cleare guidelines for any products such as in Canada, Switzerland, Scandinavia. Then we can maybe start to trust the TGA

Selsoe Stein

We certainly do not need more regulation in the field of manufacture of natural therapies. If you manufacture to TGA standards, you are possibly the most expensive manufacturer in the world. Better implementation, not more regulation, by TGA please.

Gill Shaddick

Since homeopathic medical products are chemically and physically indistinguishable from pure water, how would anyone ever know if the suppliers were just filling up their little bottles with filtered tap water? I guess that if a whole industry is a rort then there's no point targetting individual suppliers...

I believe in homeopathy (truly I do)

What's the point of having a watchdog on the 'complementary' and 'alternative' medicines industry when none of these so-called 'medicines' have been clinically tested according to scientifically accepted standards (eg double blind tests) in the first place? The whole industry is on the nose so far as I'm concerned.

George Renard

Just because something is NATURAL doesn't mean it is good for human consumption. I find this to be the case with many common folk. A vegetable or plant extract usually consists of hundreds, if not thousands, of components. Some of these components may be beneficial, while others may be detrimental. And there's also a question of synergistic-antagonistic effects on human health. These need to be thoroughly investigated, which means more funding.....oh no, I just said funding didn't I?


Government watchdogs are usually OK except when someone in government has a few mates in the industry in question whom they want to protect. Does APRA ring any bells?

I'm well connected

Rhyme - so hundreds of years of use doesn't count as rigorous testing, yet 5 years in a lab does? Interesting standard. BTW tobacco is only a killer because of the amazing number of chemical additives the tobacco companies put into the stuff. Tobacco leaf on its own is not the same as the stuff you smoke, and yes it is a useful herb.

Me Again

You name just one government watch dog that is doing its job properly - any one - any field.
There should be a watch dog to watch the watch dogs.
Maybe Simon could use that?

b dean

To Lisa

We are not talking about pigs ears and silk purses. We are talking about potential poisonings on a mass scale.

If, as you suggest, people should know what goes down their throat, do you know whether you have been drinking A1 or A2 milk?

Eat consume , be silent and die.

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