Amazon, the online retailer, has pulled more than a hundred St John’s Wort products, the herbal remedy for depression, after it was approached by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
The campaign group, the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), says the MHRA “overstepped the legal mark” and some of the 107 products should never have been removed.
The MHRA says the products were unlicensed and were making illegal medicinal claims or were inappropriately labelled. It is planning to contact other online retail outlets, including eBay, which have also been supplying the products.
It’s understood the MHRA acted after it was approached by the Health Food Manufacturers’ Association last December. The association’s executive director Graham Keen has described the action as having “a very positive outcome”.
But the ANH questions the “legitimacy of the forced product removal”, and that some of the medicinal claims are “carefully-worded health claims that are as yet not non-authorized by the European Commission.”
It says the latest ban is part of an “ongoing campaign by the MHRA to attack herbal food supplements without adequate legal justification.”
What do you think? Start a conversation over on the... WDDTY Community
Skip to content