健康英语新闻:New rules complicate EU herbal medicine market

European Commission health spokesman Frederic Vincent said in an interview with Xinhua on Thursday that each EU member state had to provide a registration system for herbal medicinal products, acknowledging that the implementation rules as well as the registration fees could vary from one member state to another.

Some EU countries, however, seemed to have fallen behind. Lin Haoran, general manager of a herbal importing company in the Netherlands, told Xinhua that several applications from Chinese herbal companies to Hungarian and Swedish medical authorities had either been rejected or been put on a waiting list.

"Local authorities don't know how to deal with it. They don't have standards yet to approve our registration," Lin said.

Some medical organizations have also warned that the directive could drive hopeless patients to look for herbal medicines over the Internet, where huge risks could always been generated.

The spokesman insisted that it was up to the member states to decide if the herbal medicinal products could be put on the market as medicine or something else.

In fact, the status of Chinese and Indian traditional medicine varies from one member state to another. In countries like Belgium, France and Italy, herbal medicinal products must be registered as medicine while the registration procedure can be difficult and costly.

In Holland and Czech Republic, herbal products can be put under the food category and there are barely any restrictions. But products from countries with liberal policies still cannot be sold to other EU member states where those products might be considered illegal since the reinforcement of the directive, industry insiders said.

Thus, despite the fact that the directive is meant to harmonize rules, the current situation seems to be more complicated than ever, as Dhaenes said, "it has caused chaos, unfair competition and discrimination."

REMEDIES

The European Benefyt Foundation and the Alliance for Natural Health recently filed a law suit together to the European Court of Justice, the EU's highest judicial body, against the European Commission, demanding a revised legal framework for traditional herbal systems.

"The directive fails to provide a legal framework for herbal importing companies, which makes us 'illegal by default,'" Dhaenens said.

He called for a statutory regulation system for therapists in coordination with the regulation system for herbal products offered by the directive.

"We need special registration system for doctors who are qualified to make herbal prescriptions," he said.

Meanwhile, Dutch medical authorities have indicated unofficially that unregistered herbal medicinal products can still enter into local market as healthcare or food supplements in the near future, according to Professor Lin Bin, practitioner of Chinese traditional medicine in the Netherlands.

Although the door may not be shut off yet, Lin said, a better choice was for the Chinese traditional medicine to go through registration so as to reduce uncertainty for the future.