A Dose of Lead or Mercury With Your Medicine
Are we being pummeled with so many warnings about heavy metals in the food and water that we're starting to tune out? Not all of the media reports about a new study that found heavy metals such as lead and mercury in a sizable sample of traditional ayurvedic medicines of India have been as cautionary (a polite word for alarming) as I would have liked them to be. I'm not a physician or toxicologist or biochemist, but I've written about alternative medicine and read a few studies over the years, and the bottom line of this one, in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is about as subtle as a traffic cop's whistle.
Here it is: Out of 193 ayurvedic medicines purchased online—115 of them manufactured in the United States, 77 in India, and 1 in Canada—about 1 in 5 contained detectable amounts of lead, mercury, and arsenic. While some reporting has noted that the incidence was higher among U.S.-made products, the difference is trivial, 21.7 percent compared with 19.5 percent of medicines from India.
It is the amount of the stuff that should be making eyelids click wide open. In the medicines with measurable quantities of one or more of the three metals, the median amount was higher than that considered safe by at least one of several public-health standards. For products made in the United States, the median concentrations were too high but considerably lower for lead and mercury than the concentrations in India-made products.
What is scarier, however, is the range. Measured in micrograms of metal for every gram of product, the highest concentration of lead in a U.S. product was 20.5 micrograms—nothing to be proud of, but insignificant compared with a high of 25,950 mcg for an Indian product. Mercury contamination in U.S. products similarly topped out at 34.5 mcg against 28,500. The worst offenders by far were rasa shastra medicines, which purposely combine herbs with metals and minerals. Practitioners say the metals are "purified" and the products are safe and therapeutic if made and administered correctly. The results of the investigation suggest otherwise, and more than twice as many of the rasa shastra drugs in the study were contaminated as the other medicines.
Don't be reassured by a label pledging "good manufacturing practices," either; 75 percent of the contaminated products carried that claim. If such medicines are part of your regimen, check for membership in the American Herbal Products Association. Among the 46 products in the study from AHPA members, only three had detectable amounts of the metals.
Tags: India | medicine | product safety
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A Dose of Lead or Mercury With Your Medicine
The fact that 3 out of 46 or 6.5% of the companies, whose products were tested and found to contain excess levels of lead, are members of the Amercian Herbal products Association is reason enough not to simply rely on a company's membership in AHPA for assurance that a dietary supplement is safe.
In fact, a recent study found excess levels of lead in dozens of women and children's Vitamins made by companies who are members of AHPA.
The fact that AHPA has no quality assurance requirement for memebership is another reason not to rely on AHPA memebership in assessing a products safety.
Indeed, under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 ( DSHEA), products sold and labeled as Dietary Supplements" can be and are sold to the public without anyone ever evaluating the product for safety or efficacy.
Unlike traditional foods or drugs, ingredients banned from use in foods and in drugs, like various stimulant herbal laxatives, can still be used in dietary supplements.
Taurine, an ingredient found in many energy drinks and supplements is banned from use in foods and drugs for human beings.
Food laws also ban cancer causing agents from Traditional foods. These same consumer protection laws do not apply to dietary supplements.
In short, many dietary supplements made by companies that one may consider reputable, sell dietary supplements that contain lead and other heavy metals.
The fact that the amounts may not be consider significant by the manufacturers ignores the fact that these products are used routinely and for long periods of time.
In toxicology, there is the principle that the Dose Makes The Poison. Under the current body of laws, the long term adverse effects from dietary supplements are not known. Until the safeguards that protect the consumer are put into place for dietary supplements, these dangers may never be uncovered.
If it is natural it is safe, is a dangerous assumption to make even if the company is well known, a member of AHPA or any other business organization that is a marker of good manufacturing practices. In fact, manufacturers of dietary supplements have no GMP's that they were required to follow since these laws has not even gone into effect. Caveat Emptor
Biased Report - Uses non-repuded sources and claims them fake!
That report takes medicines from non-reputed online sources and claims they are toxic. It completely ignores popular Ayurvedic brands like Himalaya and Kerala Ayurveda. All that report concludes is un-prescribed online drugs are fake. It is a biased report - that study does not represent Ayurveda.
BTW search about infamous Dr. Biederman and Dr. Faruk Abuzzahab to find out how dangerous and corrupt American doctors and their prescribed medicines can be. See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/aug/23/health.pharmaceuticals
The government's story on vaccines
Good article. People indeed are, thanks to the net, awash in a sea of info about everything you can imagine and everything else. It tends to take away from the positive effect of even the clearest, best written articles, a phenomenon that really gets in the way. Here's an article on the mercury and other...unconventional ingredients in vaccines and what the government has to say about the mercury itself. Fellow readers might be surprised!
http://warofillusions.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/the-abbreviated/
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U.S. News's Avery Comarow has been editor of the America's Best Hospitals annual rankings since they first appeared in 1990. His reporting on clinical medicine, from the latest cholesterol guidelines to robotic surgery, has been driven by the question: What does this mean to patients? And that is the perspective he brings to his observations and commentaries on the increasing number of programs by hospitals and other healthcare providers to improve care and patient safety.
