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Voedingssupplementen zeer veilig*
Uit een Engelse risico-analyse door Alliance for Natural Health International blijkt dat voedingssupplementen super veilig zijn. In vergelijking met bijv. medicijnen is de kans om hieraan dood te gaan ruim 66.000 keer groter dan aan voedingssupplementen. De kans om dood te gaan aan een te voorkomen fout in een ziekenhuis blijkt nog wel 300.000 keer groter te zijn. Trouwens
de kans om dood te gaan is veruit het grootst door te roken.
ANH Exclusive! Natural health products ultra-safe and drugs as dangerous as war
A picture tells a thousand words, so they say. Today, ANH-Intl releases hard data in graphical format, from official sources, showing that food supplements are the safest substances to which we are commonly exposed – while being the target of increasingly restrictive European legislation aimed at ‘protecting consumers’. In contrast, being admitted to a UK hospital or taking prescription drugs exposes a person to one of the greatest preventable risks in society.
In fact, preventable medical injuries in UK hospitals expose you to around the same risk of death as being deployed on military service to Afghanistan – both of which are around 300,000 times greater than the risk of death from taking natural health products.
Putting risks in perspective
Risk: it’s a tricky issue, and nowhere more so than in the debate around natural versus mainstream healthcare. Today, however, we’re not interested in the details and history of the debate – instead, we want to push things forward.
We’re delighted to be able to share with you graphical comparisons of the risks of death in the UK from many risky and not-so-risky activities, both as an easy-to-understand bubble chart and as a more traditional bar chart. The relative sizes of the bubbles show how likely the individual is to die from each activity: a bigger bubble means a proportionately larger risk of death. In the next few days, we’ll have more data for you, this time looking at the situation in the entire European Union (EU).
Our bar charts include the numerical
relative risks of death to the individual for those activities, which range
from taking herbal medicines and dietary supplements, via gunshot wounds and
paracetamol (acetaminophen) poisoning, to preventable medical injuries in
hospitals, adverse pharmaceutical drug reactions, smoking and military service
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Risk of death from food supplements has been
assigned a value of 1 to allow calculation of the relative risk from other
sources.
To clarify, the data only include risk of
death from acute causes, and not from chronic, long-term exposure to any of the
substances or activities we investigated. Also, the charts don’t include
any data on adverse events that do not lead to death, i.e. sublethal acute
effects. Where possible, all data are taken from UK government and
official EU sources.
The data were collated and presented by Ron
Law, an independent New Zealand-based risk management consultant.
Eight
key points from the relative risks data
- On
evaluation of the most widespread sources of preventable risk, smoking still
appears the single riskiest activity for a UK citizen: by comparison, you’re
797,940 times more likely to die from smoking than from taking a food
supplement!
- A
person resident in the UK is an incredible 293,006 times more likely to die
from preventable medical injuries than from taking a food supplement. For
herbal medicines, it’s a still-enormous 36,625 times!
- A
spell in a UK hospital poses a similar risk of death to active military
service in Iraq or Afghanistan!
- The
risk of death from pharmaceutical drugs in the UK is 62,000 times that of
taking food supplements
- Pharmaceutical
drugs pose nearly double the risk of death than motorcycle accidents on UK
roads
- The
UK
bar chart
reveals that herbal medicines and food supplements can both be regarded as
‘supersafe’, posing no significant risk of death. The risk of death
is less than 1 in 10 million people exposed to food supplements!
- By
contrast, preventable medical injuries in UK hospitals are in the
‘Dangerous’ category, with a risk of death greater than 1 in 1,000 –
along with smoking and military service in Iraq and Afghanistan
- UK
residents are about as likely to be hit by lightning or to be killed on the
London Underground than to die from taking herbal remedies or dietary
supplements
(Oktober 2012)
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