Esophagus

Rospotrebnadzor canceled the registration of 55 biological additives

A campaign has begun in Russia to bring order to the market of dietary supplements . The measures taken by the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare can not only protect the health of patients, but also assist the dietary supplement market itself, experts believe. Such conclusions are based on an analysis of drugs included in the black list of Rospotrebnadzor, published yesterday, which introduced a ban on the registration of herbal teas and balms.

The order, signed by the head of the department, the chief sanitary doctor Gennady Onishchenko, cancels the state registration certificates of 55 health food additives at once. Altai “Evading Peony” and “Taiga Hermit - Herbal Tea for Women”, Tver “Feminine Origin”, Peruvian “Dry Extract of Geranium Pasuchaka”, mysterious Indian product “Chyawanprash Avalekha Special”, Chinese syrup “Treasure of the Kidneys”, Indonesian “Geisha” , as well as many more American, Canadian and even Dutch pills and tinctures will no longer confuse Russians with their ambiguous names. They do not comply with the new sanitary and epidemiological rules (SanPiN) and new additions to them. Additions to SanPiN “Hygienic requirements for the safety and nutritional value of food products” were adopted only at the end of spring, but have already dramatically changed the lives of manufacturers and suppliers of paramedicinal products.

For the first time since 2002, this document changed the list of substances prohibited for use in dietary supplements; there were 276 more of them. Another 18 ingredients are no longer allowed to be sold as single-component food additives, that is, in their pure form. As stated in the annex to the sanitary rules, the reason for the ban is the impossibility of completely eliminating the transmission of infectious diseases through crushed and evaporated skulls, brains, eyes and tonsils of ruminant animals - it turns out that many companies add all this to their drugs. It is completely prohibited to feed scorpions, Spanish flies and seven-spotted ladybugs to Russians, as well as all spore-bearing microorganisms, live yeast, mold and opportunistic bacteria.

“The decision to cancel the registration of a large number of dietary supplements is due to the introduction of new rules,” confirmed Vremya Novostey at the Cyprus company Vision Group, which, due to the new Sanitary Regulations, had to abandon only one of its products. Entrepreneurs believe that the ban was the result of another random check of the assortment of pharmacies by Rospotrebnadzor. Goods that do not meet the new requirements were clearly placed in warehouses before the new rules were introduced and were not re-registered. “With the introduction of new standards, each dietary supplement must undergo 10 to 15 laboratory tests, depending on the number of ingredients. Previously there were only six,” said the Vision Group. - Plus two or three tests separately for each component, which the previous rules did not imply at all. As a result, the entire procedure takes at least three months.”

“Refusal to register is a normal working moment,” says DSM Group CEO Alexander Kuzin, who monitors events in the dietary supplement market. “But it could have a positive impact on the image of supplements, which has been tarnished in the public eye by several high-profile scandals and a general feeling of neglect.” According to Mr. Kuzin, in this case we are not talking about the primary market players - only one drug from the leader in sales of dietary supplements from the Evalar company was included in the list of “disenfranchised”, all other manufacturers are not even included in the top twenty largest companies. This means that there is no need to talk about any full-scale attack on dietary supplements. Although Mr. Kuzin considers the slow “tightening of the screws” obvious: the additive market has noticeably slowed down its growth in recent years. The increase in 2007 was only 12%, although sales of finished medicines on the commercial market increased by more than a third, and the pharmaceutical cosmetics market grew by one and a half times. According to the expert, sales were affected by tightening advertising legislation and increased competition for space on pharmacy shelves from related pharmaceutical products - shower gels, toothbrushes and soap. Their reputation in the eyes of customers is impeccable.

Galina PAPERNAYA