Taken
from Newmediaexplorer.org October 26, 2003
Organic, natural
health-care is under attack. If the current trend continues,
say Helen Fullerton and Martin Walker, the world’s health
may soon be entirely in the pockets of the mighty pharmaceutical
corporations. These are
the opening lines to an article published in March 2000,
but still a very interesting read.
We now are in the midst of
an all-out concerted
attack on natural remedies, supplements, non conventional
cures - anything that could compete with the pharmaceutical
paradigm in medicine. That outdated paradigm is dear to
the hearts of both investors in pharmaceutical fortunes
and those in government
who are supposed to promote public health but have ended
up promoting pharmaceutical profits instead.
How did we get into the current
pickle? The article by Helen Fullerton and Martin Walker
brings us up to speed on the events of the last two decades
leading up to the current confrontation.
Health Ltd.
(The
original is here)
Date Published: 22/ 03/ 2000
Author: Helen Fullerton and Martin Walker
Organic, natural health-care
is under attack. If the current trend continues, say Helen
Fullerton and Martin Walker, the world’s health may soon
be entirely in the pockets of the mighty pharmaceutical
corporations.
Health and its maintenance,
in contemporary ‘developed’ society, is complex. Perhaps
the most important part of this complexity, however, is
the ongoing conflict between individual health-care and
the professional, pharmacological response to disease
which has come to dominate society.
General levels of health in
developed societies have steadily improved over the last
hundred years, broadly because of developments in the
life sciences and public health. This progress, however,
seems to bear little relationship to the delivery of medicine.
While scientific medicine has generated some solutions,
it has also bequeathed deadly problems. Crucially, it
has led to a virtual takeover of ‘healthcare’ by pharmaceutical
corporations and an acceptance that pharmaceutical medicine
is primary and best. Yet the extent of the damage done
by drugs is enormous. In the US in 1994, it was estimated
that there were over two million severe adverse drug reactions,
of which 106,000 were fatal(1). Similar calculations suggest
that in England, adverse drug reactions are the third
most common cause of death(2).
Drug companies have always
supported ‘orthodox’ medicine. Medicine’s high-ranking
professional bodies were themselves set up with help from
pharmaceutical companies, and still receive grants for
running costs, hospitality, building and printing. The
Royal College of GPs, for example, received £105,000
from Glaxo, Wellcome and Beecham when it was set up in
the early 1950s. The Royal College of Physicians has received
funding from the pharmaceutical industry, as has the Royal
Society of Medicine. Given this funding, is it surprising
that reports sponsored by such bodies so often lambast
the use of vitamins, food supplements, nutritional and
alternative medicine?
Today, however, the corporatisation
of medicine is gaining speed and reaches far beyond the
professional institutions of medicine.
THE MEDICAL RESEARCH
COUNCIL
The Medical
Research Council (MRC), a public body, is the closest
thing to a national research institute in Britain. Originally
independent, funded entirely by government and concerned
with public health, it has veered wildly away from its
original purpose. Today, while most of its £282 million
a year funding is public money from the Department of
Trade and Industry, the direction of its research is strongly
influenced by commercial interests. From 1997 to 1998,
eight of the 16-person MRC Council declared vested interests,
four of them in the largest pharmaceutical and chemical
companies. The MRC’s 1996 Annual Report stated that 96
industrial consultancies are held by MRC staff, and that
the MRC itself holds equity in five life-science companies.
MRC earnings from collaboration
with industry in 1995 and 1996 were £6.2 million. A considerable
part of the MRC’s work involves carrying out lucrative
pharmaceutical trials for the big drug companies. For
example, the ‘ISIS-4’ trial conducted by the Clinical
Trials Unit at Oxford, supported by the MRC and the British
Heart Foundation (BHF), compared the effect of tradi-tionally
used magnesium in heart attack patients with that of Capitrol,
a drug produced by Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS). The results
of ISIS-4 suggested that magnesium was ineffective compared
with Capitrol. As a consequence of this study, NHS policy
shifted away from the use of the cheap and effective magnesium
and towards expensive pharmaceutical drugs.
This new clinical policy was
accepted despite the fact that it was BMS which paid $6
million for the study and the trial came under considerable
critical review because of its methods; especially the
use of high doses of magnesium. While collaborative projects
with big drug and chemical companies earn money for the
MRC, they also help the drug companies make huge profits
when drugs given the MRC stamp of approval are sold to
the NHS.
THE MOVMEMENT FOR REAL
DOCTORS
In the mid-1980s, national
campaigns against ‘health fraud’ were set up in the US,
Canada and Britain. Although these organisations maintained
that they were principally concerned with the delivery
of ‘effective health-care’, in fact they constituted aggressive
campaigns against the use in health-care of vitamins and
food supplements, and against ‘alternative’ health therapies
and their practitioners. In Britain, the Campaign Against
Health Fraud (HealthWatch) was set up in 1987. Financed
initially by medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies,
HealthWatch waged an aggressive and very public campaign
against alternative, complementary and natural medicines.
A number of its original members
were associated with the Wellcome Foundation drug company
and its charitable arm the Wellcome Trust. The inauguration
of the campaign in the US and Canada, as well as in Britain,
began with the licensing and testing of Wellcome’s anti-AIDS
drug AZT.
The marketing of AZT set a new gold standard for aggressive,
covert drug marketing strategies. Every possible influence
was used to sell AZT, nationally and internationally both
to governments and direct to consumers. Five out of the
25 members of the Medicines Commission which eventually
licensed AZT in Britain had connections with Wellcome.
Following the licensing, Wellcome
placed money and representatives wherever they could sway
opinions. A year after the drug had been licensed, Wellcome
gave £10,000 to the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group
on AIDS, the gatekeeper for information on AIDS treatments
in the House of Commons. Representatives of Wellcome’s
PR firms were placed on committees which allocated AIDS
funding; the funding went only to groups that were uncritical
of AZT. In a move deliberately intended to promote AZT
among GPs, Wellcome granted £144,000 to an AIDS foundation
set up by the British Medical Association (BMA). Between
1987 and 1993, when the ‘Concorde’
trials helped hammer several nails into AZT’s coffin
by demonstrating that it actually worsened the health
of asymptomatic individuals who had tested HIV positive,
the drug earned over £200million for Wellcome.
Contrast this with the case
of germanium. In 1988, a highly-qualified bio-science
researcher, Dr Sandra Goodman, compiled a literature
review of organic germanium. Discovering that researchers
from the 1920s onwards had investigated its anti-viral
properties, and believing that the substance might help
people who tested HIV positive, Dr Goodman pressed the
MRC to carry out trials. Despite sending papers to all
the relevant committees, meeting with scientists, doctors
and politicians, Goodman got nowhere.
Soon after Goodman began to
press for the testing of germanium, items began to appear
in the media about its dangers to health. The hardest-hitting
article(3) carried quotes from Professor Vincent Marks,
a founding member of HealthWatch. Marks’ department at
Surrey University was in receipt of half a million pounds’
funding from the Wellcome Foundation, some for HIV-related
work. Marks called germanium ‘a worthless and dangerous
poison’, and said that ‘they [germanium, cadmium and other
natural drugs] were killing people by the thousands from
kidney failure’. Not long after this article appeared,
germanium was banned from sale by the UK Department of
Health.
Dr Goodman wrote to the Japanese
researchers whom Marks had quoted as reporting kidney
damage due to germanium. She found that these researchers
had been referring to germanium sesquioxide, a mineral
form of germanium. In their return letter, the scientists
told her that in recent research they had found organic
germanium to be completely non-toxic.
SUPPLEMENT WARS
Pharmaceutical interests have
battled fiercely for the last 20 years to restrict the
public’s use of vitamin and mineral supplements which
pose a threat to their patented, chemical stranglehold
on the medicines market. As with the ‘Health Fraud’ episodes,
they have employed various strategies. They have claimed
that vitamins and food supplements are hazardous to health;
that there is no nutritional need for them; and that the
public has to be protected against ‘quacks’ who peddle
them. In their battle against natural remedies, corporations
have succeeded in enshrining in law the principle that
nutritional supplements cannot be associated with claims
for better health. Finally they have tried to squeeze
supplements out of the market by harmonising international
trade regulations.
Controlling regulations is
the key to killing off natural medicines, and the battle
to rationalise them continues. In the UK, a government
working group on Dietary Supplements and Health Foods,
set up in response to ‘concern about the potential hazards
of dietary supplements’(4), produced a highly flawed report
which was later used by the EU Commission to prepare a
1992 draft Directive on dietary supplements.
The EU draft Directive ruled
that dietary supplements should only be available on the
basis of ‘nutritional need’. In Britain, outraged nutritional
therapists, organised by Linda Lazarides of the Society
for the Promotion of Nutritional Therapies warned that
dietary supplements could be swept off the shelves entirely.
An unprecedented public campaign to stop the Directive
so shook the Council of Ministers that they decided to
restrict community legislation ‘to what was strictly needed,
and apply where necessary the principle of mutual recognition’.
In March 1993, the Commission announced that there was
no need for Community Legislation on dietary supplements(5).
During the late 1980s, and throughout the 1990s, there
were continuous and well-publicised attacks on vitamins
and food supplements. In July 1996, acting on the advice
of two of its advisory committees, the UK government announced
its intention to restrict the free availability of Vitamin
B6 to 10mg. The advisers had said that higher levels of
B6 could lead to sensory neuropathy (tingling and numbness
in the extremities, and disorientation). The 10mg figure
was based on an incorrect toxicological extrapolation
from animal experimentation, and a biased citation of
one study rejected as fraud by all nutritional scientists(6).
In April 1998 the US National Academy of Sciences reviewed
B6, and reported ‘no observed adverse effect level’, even
after prolonged intake of 300mg per day(7). Levels of
25-200mg per day are commonly taken by those deficient
in functional B6. In July 1998, the government gave in
to protests, and the legislation was reluctantly deferred
‘until a new expert group on vitamins and minerals had
reported’.
PLAYING WITH WORDS
The next trick was the best.
The pharmaceutical industry and its allies came up with
what they thought was a surefire way of banishing natural
remedies from the shelves by reclassifying them as medicines.
While classified as ‘food supplements’, they could be
sold relatively freely, but as ‘medicines’, they would
need a product licence – ‘market authorisation’ in Eurospeak.
Such a licence could only be obtained on proof not only
of ‘safety and quality’, but of ‘efficacy’, a qualification
usually ‘proved’ by animal experimentation, and expensive
clinical trials.
Unchecked, this strategy would
have meant the end of natural remedies. Apart from trial
costs, a licence itself would cost upwards of £80,000
a product. Reclassifying supplements as medicines was
the policy of the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA)
in the 1980s. FDA officers – often with guns – would raid
clinics looking for ‘illegal’ Vitamin B(8). But an outraged
public, almost 50 per cent of whom took supplements, forced
a change in the law. In 1994 Congress passed The Dietary
Supplement Health and Education Act, which guaranteed
free availability of supplements and information as to
their function. In Canada, at this time, doctors were
struck off simply for prescribing vitamins. Manufacturers
were charged exorbitant Drug Identification Number (DIN)
fees when they made low-key health claims for products
like fish oil. The government’s regulatory body reclassified
167 remedies, including feverfew and ginger, as ‘medicines’(9).
As in the US, though, angry citizens raised an outcry,
forcing the Health Minister to scrap the DIN fees and
declassify food supplements.
The most devastating weapon
in the hands of the pharmaceutical industry in Europe
has been Article 1 of the 65/65 EU Directive of 1965,
which defined a product as a ‘medicine’ if it was used
‘to treat or prevent a disease ... or if it makes medical
diagnosis, or ... restores, corrects or modifies a physiological
function in human beings ... or in animals’. On these
criteria, every food supplement is medicinal, even if
no claims are made for it. In 1994, the UK government
implemented the Directive using two statutory instruments
which were passed without debate.
It was only with the publication
of the MCA guidelines (MAL8) that implications were spelt
out and massive public protest forced the MCA to back
down. In 1998, following the government climbdown over
B6 the UK Medicine Control Agency sprung a consultation
letter on the health food industry, laying out new procedures
whereby the MCA would have sole authority to decide whether
a product was a medicine. The document gave the health
food industry just one month to respond. The changes were
to be brought in on April 1st 1999. Under the proposed
regulations, the MCA was to have powers to enter premises
with the police, remove ‘illegal’ natural products, and
prosecute anyone selling them.
Yet again, however, public
protests forced the government to compromise and give
reassurances that, ‘the proposals would not change the
status of products which are correctly classified now
as nutritional supplements and the exemptions for herbal
remedies would similarly remain intact’(10). But what
was meant by the term ‘correctly classified’?
HARM-ONY?
The international ‘harmonisation’
of medicines is a major part of the strategy to squeeze
out non-corporate health-care solutions. The main international
instrument of market-fixing is the ‘Codex Alimentarius’,
which is empowered by the World Health Organisation (WHO)
to set international standards for drugs, food, pesticides
and dietary supplements; ‘to guide the world’s growing
food industry and to protect the health of consumers’.
Codex has a membership of 146 countries, each of which
has one vote. Various organisations are allowed to attend
meetings, but over 90 per cent of these are multinational
corporations. Following lobbying from the multinationals,
no state can set higher standards for its own health,
environmental protection or consumer freedom than those
set by Codex. Any nation setting its own standards could
be heavily fined by the WTO. In 1996, Codex met in Bonn
to formulate radical changes in the rules that govern
dietary supplements. The German delegation had drafted
a proposal sponsored by the drug company Hoechst, Bayer
and BASF arguing that no herb, vitamin or mineral should
be sold for prophylactic or therapeutic reasons and that
supplements should be reclassified as drugs. They wanted
these regulations to be binding throughout the WTO. The
proposals were provisionally accepted on a vote of 16
to two, but later complaints and protests halted their
implementation.
THE END OF HEALTH FOODS?
Throughout the 1990s, drug
companies forced to accept that supplements and herbs
were not going to be simply swept out of the market embarked
upon two new stratagems. First, they took over small firms,
so that they could incorporate the natural remedies into
their pharmaceutical product marketing. Second, many companies
merged with the food manufacturers who were incorporating
vitamins and minerals into processed foods. If food supplements
were put into foods, this would head off the demand for
their separate, clinical use and leave the market clear
for drugs.
A good example of a vitamin
and supplement company ‘changing sides’ is that of Solgar.
In 1999, the company was bought by American Home Products,
one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies. This
means that a previously independent provider of high-quality
supplements has now become part of the vicious circle
which affects contemporary health in Europe and America.
While one arm of a multinational produces health-eroding
chemicals, another arm holds out pharmaceuticals and food
supplements to help ameliorate the damage.
The most lucrative expansion
of pharmaceutical companies, however, is into fortified
and functional foods – known as ‘neutraceuticals’. Neutraceutical
foods claim health benefits by virtue of their added vitamin,
mineral or herbal constituents. These products are advertised
as containing anthocyanins as antioxidants, phytoestrogens
to protect the heart, and sterols to block cholesterol
uptake. In this way, high-sugar low-nutritional junk foods
are dressed up as healthy.
It is ironic that the ‘health
claims’ issue fought out over the last half-century, against
small supplement companies, could finally be settled by
multinational food companies, using the rationale of free
trade to swamp the EU markets with fortified and functional
foods. It would be typical of the ongoing trend towards
the corporatisation of human health-care.
THE LOCAL ALTERNATIVE
The most progressive practitioners
and researchers in the NHS are presently trying to rationalise
health-care, by looking in detail at the effectivity of
treatments. The motivation for this rationalisation is,
however, the serious fiscal crisis in the health care
system. While this approach will undoubtedly lead to the
end of unnecessary or unevidenced procedures and a regularisation
of best clinical practice, such an approach does not begin
to tackle the influence of corporate capitalism in health
care. The institutions of medical practice in Britain
have fought an unrelenting battle against alternative
practitioners of all kinds. Instead of joining forces
with the best of these traditions, orthodox medical practitioners
have either ignored them or denounced their practitioners
as quacks. Meanwhile the real enemy of the people and
their health care, industrial science and its vested interests,
has crept up and then overtaken the healing physician.
If health and healing are to be returned to the community,
they have to be decorporatised, and we have to begin again
from the base of the community, building health centres
in which the local population can participate and where
prevention is the first principle. In a post-industrial
age our everyday lives are radically affected by multinational
companies and our health affected by their products. If
we desire autonomy and control over our own bodies, we
have to a great extent to resist multinational organisations
and the governments which front for them.
Martin J Walker is the author
of six books. He is a writer, investigator and lecturer,
who, since the publication of his last book, 'Dirty Medicine',
has been writing mainly about the social history of environmental
health. At the present time, he is researching organophosphate
pesticides, factory farming and the history of alternative
cancer therapies in Britain.
Helen Fullerton is an independent researcher mainly in
trace element and vitamin nutrition, and their contribution
to immune responses in humans and animals particularly
with respect to current problems such as BSE, bovine TB,
chronic organophosphate poisoning, and multiple chemical
sensitivity. She has been a lecturer in agricultural chemistry,
at Glasgow University, and learned homeopathy when livestock
farming.
Further Reading
1 Lazarou J et al, Incidence of adverse drug reactions
in hospitalised patients, 'J Am Med Assoc' 1998;279:1200-1205.
2 Dalziel M. Director of Public Health, North Thames Branch
of the NHS Executive, reported in 'New Scientist' Sept
19 1998 p21.
3 Campbell D, Pretty Poison, 'New Statesman and Society',
8 September 1989.
4 'The Denner Report: Report of the Working Group on Dietary
Supplements and Health Foods', MAFF publications, London
SE99 7TP March 1991.
5 Letter from Nicholas Soames, Food Minister MAFF to Alan
Williams MP Nov 30 1992.
6 Abraham GE, Management of premenstrual tension syndrome:
rationale for a nutritional approach in A Year in Nutritional
Medicine 198, 2nd ed 'New Canaan', Conn Keats 1986:126-166.
7 US National Academy of Sciences, 'Dietary Reference
Intakes for the B Vitamins', April 1998 7.22.
8 Fleisher MA, Nutritional rights threatened by Codex,
'Our Toxic Times' Dec 1997 p22.
9 Rona SP, 'HPB – protects the pharmaceutical industry,
harms the public', Excerpt quoted in 'The Civil Abolitionist'
1997;8(3):1.
10 Paul Brittain, Borderline Senior Policy Advisor to
Medical Control Agency, letter to writer (HF) May 17 1999.
Also Frank Dobson, Minister of Health, letter to Alan
Williams MP May 17 1999.
My comment: Much has happened since this
article was written, but as far as it goes, it's an excellent
description of how we came to the present situation where
more and more of our natural alternatives are legislated
away as "dangerous" or "unscientific" - just another way
of saying they could be bad for pharma profits.
It might be worth to see other
articles on this site, in particular those you find under
the headings of
Legislation
and
Pharma
See also
Skewed
- Martin Walker's latest book
European
Directive Against Vitamins & Minerals
US
government sides with junk food manufacturers
