Govt. suspends company, Over 1,600 brands Recalled
On 28th April the Australian government suspended the manufacturing license of Pan Pharmaceuticals Ltd., Australia’s biggest and the world’s fifth largest contract manufacturer of vitamins and health supplements. Pan was caught lying about ingredient content and the substitution of cheaper and untested raw materials, for contaminated and impure products, for falsifying test results and for false labelling. Employees now report that they were even made to sweep-up waste product from the floor and throw it back into the machines.
In the nation’s largest ever recall of medical items, over 660 products affecting more than 1,600 brands sold by hundreds of companies under differing labels in Australia have been recalled.
The company’s license to export was also revoked. Pan Pharmaceuticals makes about 4,500 products sold in more than 40 countries overseas, the majority of them in Asia. Countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore have all been affected and recalls in many of these countries have been announced.
Pan manufactures 70% of Australia’s nutritional supplements and the recall hits some of the nation’s biggest selling brands. These include companies and labels such as:
Bio Organics, Bullivant’s, Cenovis, Essential Nutrients, Golden Glow, Herbal Valley, Kordel’s, Queensland Bio-Chemics, Natural Alternative, Nature’s Own, Naturopathica and Vitelle.
All of which have been recalled by their makers in Australia but many of which are exported overseas.
Not the First time....
This is not the first time Pan Pharmaceuticals and its founder Jack Selim have drawn the attention of Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). As far back as 1976 Selim was fined for selling paracetamol tabs without any paracetamol in it. Since January 2000 the TGA were experiencing obstruction with their audits and subsequently found that untested herbs were routinely used in formulations, beef cartilage was substituted for shark cartilage, Thai oils substituted for Canadian primrose oil, the brand Natural Nutrition Menopause was found to have 0.56mg of the main ingredient isoflavone instead of the 60 mg claimed, and machines were left uncleaned between batches. In March this year this led to 19 people being hospitalised and over 80 people becoming seriously ill after taking the travel sickness pill Travacalm.
Not Surprised....
Why am I not at all surprised by all this?
Because it is exactly what I’ve been saying all along.
Supplements work - But most DON’T!
Despite the fact that there is now a huge body of properly conducted clinical research to show nutritional supplementation really does work in preventing and treating disease and you are right to take them, the fact remains that:
70% of anything you are likely to buy in a health food or any other kind of shop is going to be a waste of your money.
Why?
Because a lot of of it will have been formulated by fraudulent companies and cheats like Pan Pharmaceuticals and Jack Selim, that’s just one reason why.
They can lie to you about what’s really in it. They can manufacture cheaply and in such a way that whatever is in it will never do you any good. If they’re smart, they can con you and mislead you on the label in any number of ways, without even having to lie outright. And you’ll never know!
The supplements industry is huge, worth something approaching US$30 billion per annum. With that much at stake why would you suppose the ethics of the people who really run the supplements industry are going to be any more noble than CEO's in tobacco, energy, packaged foods or the financial industries, who’ve all been caught cheating the public?
What you need to understand is, between creating shareholder value and feathering their own nests, they really don’t think they are doing much wrong.
In the unlikely event they get caught they expect a fine and a slap on the wrist and then get right on back to devising new ways of bilking the public. That’s the way these people think. And generally they are right. That is the way government normally reacts. They are genuinely surprised and shocked if they are called criminals and draw jail time - which is what they are and what they should get.
Another big reason why the odds are stacked against you is that, even if the the goods sold are what they’re supposed to be, it will not contain enough of it to do you any good.
And why is that?
Because governments have been persuaded to pass upper levels on vitamins and herbs that can be freely sold to us because we might harm ourselves and can’t be trusted to buy nutritional supplements in any strength likely to work.
And who has persuaded them of this?
Crooks like Jack Selim and companies like Pan Pharmaceuticals for a start.
Then there are those doctors and members of the medical establishment, neanderthals who believe that it is wrong for any member of the public to have the right to take any decision affecting their own wellbeing and see it as a threat to their professional standing and prerequisites.
And then, of course, there is Big Pharma.
Did you know these guys actually make most of the vitamins we take? But they don’t want us to take too many of them, that would affect the sale of the drugs they make. Drugs cost a lot, a lot more than vitamins you can’t patent, d’yer see. They want to see all nutritional supplements in any therapeutic dose scheduled as drugs and made available to us in the same way and at the same cost as medication.
It is true some vitamins or herbs taken wrongly can harm you. But it is a rare thing. It kills very few people. But correctly prescribed and over-the-counter drugs do kill people, lots of people, hundreds of thousands of them every year in fact. It is the third largest cause of death.
Unfortunately these vested interests have been largely successful in persuading government regulatory bodies in Europe and Australia to limit the public’s right to buy nutritional supplements by limiting upper dosage levels and by making it hard to import existing formulations from overseas. Meantime, as we see, they lack the manpower and political motivation to police the entrenched corporate wrongdoers or to go up against the powerful medical establishment and lobbying clout of the pharmaceutical majors.
This is not yet the case in the US fortunately, where an educated public combined with the supplements industry have managed to fight off determined efforts to limit our right to buy what we want. Thus in America (IF you know what you’re doing) you can still find and buy freely the very best natural formulations that exist anywhere in the world. The US is unquestionably on the cutting edge of healing and anti-aging through nutrition.
It is also the place where there are a legion of Jack Selims and other snake oil salesmen and wolf packs of companies like Pan Pharmaceuticals, all eager to relieve you of your hard earned money.
As always America has the best and the worst.
What’s the Answer......?
The problem is, it simply isn’t a level playing field for the consumer.
Most people who buy supplements, if they think of it at all, assume that their bottle of vitamins or herbs with some warm and fuzzy name like “Nature’s Best” or “Super Health” is actually made by the company whose name is on the label. Seldom is this true. Most times it is made by a contract manufacturer like Pan Pharmaceuticals. All they do is order from the manufacturer’s product list and slap their own label on it. Rarely do they bother or care to assess what is actually in the bottle. Sometimes they will go so far as to ask for a particular formulation made up to their own specifications, but mostly they just buy the stuff off the shelf.
You may believe you are getting what you pay for but the odds are you are not. There is a strong possibility that the expensive ingredients have been substituted for much cheaper ones or the amounts are often less than claimed on the label.
Good manufacturing procedures matter. If the product is badly formulated or has certain excipients or additives included, even if the ingredients are good ones, it is unlikely you’ll absorb the active ingredient you want and you will be wasting your money. If the machines making the pills are not cleaned, products get contaminated with impurities or you get a harmful mixture of raw materials. That’s what made all those people who took Travacalm so sick.
More Legislation?
Do we need more regulation to protect us?
Well, yes and no......
What we do NOT need is more legislation telling us what we can or cannot buy. We must beware those voices that tell us “all dietary supplements are a waste of money” and the self-appointed “Quackfinder Generals” shilling for Big Pharma. We should view with great suspicion those who say all dietary substances should be controlled and only available with a doctor’s prescription. Such people almost always have a self-serving agenda of their own.
Nutritional supplements are not drugs and are low risk, they are food extracts and as such there are already laws governing their safety and quality. It is simply a question of enforcing existing regulations. Drugs on the other hand are high risk and have to satisfy conditions of efficacy as well as safety and quality. That is as it should be.
As it is, Jack Selim and other Pan executives could face criminal charges for manufacturing counterfeit drugs, which they did as well as counterfeiting natural supplements. In 2000 Australia enacted legislation to make the import, manufacture and supply of counterfeit medicines a criminal offense in line with WHO guidelines on the subject.
The first thing that needs to be done is to make it a criminal offense to counterfeit nutritional supplements as well as drugs. Government should also consider jail terms and increasing fines for those found falsifying records.
Next, there should be a legal requirement as part of the licensing process to show that the owners and executives of pharmaceutical manufacturing companies are fit and proper people to run them. That way we could weed out sharks like Jack Selim.
And finally, the greatest harm caused by this massive recall is that nobody could tell whether the brands they were buying in the shops were made by Pan or not.
There need to be clear labelling laws stating exactly who made the product and where it came from. This more than anything would allow the informed consumer to make an educated choice.
Then, if the TGA and similar bodies in other countries, have the motivation and the resources to ensure that manufacturing companies don’t cheat and enforce the regulations with surprise audits rather than relying on industry self-regulation, we might be getting somewhere.
The last thing any of us should want to see are natural supplements scheduled as drugs. That is unless you want to pay three times as much for them.
