Death by vitamin

The Irish are lucky—and not just in general. They’re especially lucky when it comes to vitamins and supplements. With those fusty old bureaucrats in the European Union dithering for years in setting the maximum doses that people
can safely take, Ireland’s own watchdog has acted decisively.

With Ireland’s supplement market tripling in just 10 years, the Irish Food Safety Authority has set the upper safe levels for 21 vitamins and minerals. “We are concerned about the safety of vulnerable groups of the population in Ireland, including children, pregnant women and older people,” said the authority’s chief executive, Dr Pamela Byrne.

Her concerns were shared by the chairman of the authority’s scientific committee, Professor Albert Flynn, who said: “There can be adverse health effects when people take too much of some vitamins or minerals.”1

And there must be statistics to back up his worries, right? Step forward the American Association of Poison Control Centers, which collates deaths and adverse reactions reported to poison centers around the US, including reactions to pharmaceuticals, illicit drugs, chemicals, household products, cosmetics, vitamins and minerals, which are also considered poisons.

According to its 2017 report, the number of deaths from overdosing on vitamins A, C, E, niacin, pyridoxine (B6) or other B vitamins was . . . zero. OK, how about minerals?      Overdose deaths from calcium, magnesium, chromium, zinc, colloidal silver, selenium, iron or multi-mineral supplements were . . . also zero. There were no deaths from amino acids, creatine, blue-green algae, glucosamine or chondroitin, either.

There must have been some deaths from herbs, surely? The body count from concoctions such as blue cohosh, echinacea, ginkgo, ginseng, kava kava, St John’s wort, valerian, yohimbe, ma huang (ephedra), kola nut and yerba mate was . . . yes, zero.

Of course, there were no deaths from homeopathic remedies, because as the skeptics like to remind us, they’re just water-based placebos. And nobody died from Ayurvedic medicine, either.

Someone died from an “unknown single ingredient botanical,” and an “unknown energy drink” was somehow implicated in another death, but “the obvious uncertainty of such listings diminishes any claim of validity,” said Andrew W. Saul, editor of Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, who reported on the lethal list.

There was also one possible fatality from taking vitamin D, but the vitamin’s role was “contributory,” which could mean the person died—as people do—and happened to be taking vitamin D at the time.

Not quite so many gray areas when it comes to prescription pharmaceuticals. Analgesics, or painkillers, were the single most toxic agent reported to poison centers, accounting for around 288,000 adverse reactions or deaths.

Sedatives and antipsychotics weren’t too far behind, with around 150,000 victims, followed by antidepressants, with 131,000 adverse reactions.

All these cases are recorded as poisons, because the drugs were taken “inappropriately”—such as inadvertent overdosing, taking someone else’s medication by mistake, or taking doses too close together.

What about deaths from prescription medications taken correctly? The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that US government agencies don’t track drug deaths, so, trying to create a clearer picture, Thomas J Moore, senior scientist for drug safety and policy at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, has been setting up systems that monitor deaths in hospitals.

Assuming people go to a hospital after suffering a drug reaction, Moore estimates that 128,000 Americans die each year from a drug taken according to the prescription, including correct dose and frequency.2

That figure is consistent with estimates prepared by Professor Thomas Light at the Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine, who wrote a paper with the no-holds-barred title, “Institutional Corruption of Pharmaceuticals and the Myth of Safe and Effective Drugs.”3

In the paper, he estimates that around 2,460 Americans die each week from a drug properly taken.

Even these figures are conservative. Studies into the safety and effectiveness of drugs often don’t record adverse reactions at all.

In fact, researchers from the UK’s University of York discovered that just 38 percent of the 1,376 reviews of healthcare interventions they analyzed even mentioned adverse reactions.4

We’re sure the Irish regulators are on the case.

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