PROPOSALS OF THE FUNCTIONARYS OF THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH

PROPOSALS OF THE FUNCTIONARYS OF THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH

1. The Chilean health authority permits that the consumers are not effectively warned of the high dangers of the pharmaceuticals drugs. Only the nicotine business is obliged to warn consumers of the health danger that the addiction to tobacco represents. This represents an isolated case, as there are many other recreational drugs publicized by other medias. Equal to the case of tobacco, all the synthetic drugs destined for health therapies, and also all recreational drugs, should publicize their potential danger to different organs, glands, tissues and processes of the human body. For their part, the natural health foods should be permitted to declare their nutritional properties and the segments of the population to which they are destined, and the intrinsic benefits that they poses for human health.

2. We reject all attempt to pharmaco –monopolize the tradition of herb use and Chilean nourishment. A “healthy” Public Health system is closer to the Natural Health than the “Pharmaceutical Treatments”. For this reason, we reject the laws the Ministry of Health has tried to impose on Chile to satisfy pharmaceutical criteria, all destined to inhibit, restrict or prohibit health foods and their contents, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, and botanical elements or phyto-nutrients contained in the culinary, health giving and aromatic herbs. – the actual dispositions which we reject are, among others, the Resolution 1844/98 and the Decree 855/98. – Other dispositions that are in project in the Ministry of Health, according to the October the 1^st version, are the projects DS 286 (Creation of Phyto-pharmaceutical and the restriction of medical herbs) and DS 287 (Limits and medical projections of the food supplements).

3. The functionaries of the Ministry of Health do not understand natural health, even less, the role that herbs and foods play in the recuperations and maintenance of the healthy physiological states of people. We advise that a large part of the inconsideration of the Ministry of Health, is due to this professional deformation. Generally, the functionaries that work in this partition of the state come form universities that have not incorporated into their curriculum of their students assignments related to natural medicine, neither the same interest to comprehend postgraduate courses or inform themselves through other means. It is necessary to incorporate into the ministry, competent personal, and to train those that exist in these matters before dictating laws over health foods

4. We reject the application of every type of registration fee on the natural herbs that the functionaries of the Public Health Institute (ISP) whish to impose, in the pharmaceutical branch of the Ministry of Health. All culinary, health giving, aromatic or cosmetic herbs are, and should be considered at the free disposition of the citizen who wishes to cultivate, recollect, store, or distribute in whatever form that provides the best access for its consumption. Nobody has the right in Chile, or in any other place on this planet, to subject vegetable species to whatever type of administrative restriction, through high fees, patents or other. All vegetable species belong to some type of national germplasm that is the patrimony of humanity.