Restrictions on the advertising of medicines and therapies in the EU should be eased in the interest of promoting public health, the former president of the European Parliament, Mr Pat Cox claimed today.
He told a conference on patients rights in Brussels that a ban enforced in 1992 had led to the public being less informed and consequentially at greater risk of ill health. This worked counter to the shift in EU policy focus from treating illness to promoting health, he said.
He quoted the former EU health commissioner David Byrne's belief in the need for "reliable information on how to be in good health and about diseases and treatment options".
Mr Cox said: "The informed act earlier and the uninformed carry higher risks ... It is clear that ignorance costs and at the limit ignorance kills.
"Equally it is clear that the system costs of late diagnosis and the treatment of chronic illness are greater than early diagnosis and timely intervention."
He cited the advertising of margarine products which claim to lower cholesterol as an example of how the ban fails the public, while statins - a class of medicine proven to reduce cholesterol - cannot be promoted in the same way.
He also said "alternative" medicines can be promoted on the Internet, while information on "highly regulated, evidence-led and scientifically based medicines which carry the full panoply of product liability", are totally banned.
"I find it paradoxical that personally I am entitled to learn more about the car I drive as a European citizen than the medical remedies available to my own family that might impact our quality of life," Mr Cox said.
Mr Cox told ireland.comthat his speech followed an invitation from the Active Citizenship Network (ACN) which organised the conference and was not connected to the consultancy firm he recently set up.
The ACN has been monitoring the implementation of the EU's Patients' Charter.
He said the regulatory regime was also leading to major research and development work being shifted outside the EU.
"In many influential decision-making circles in the EU and its member states pharmaceutical companies, key innovators, are treated as objects of suspicion rather than as agents of progress.
"As a result, quite a few European pharmaceutical companies, global leaders, have moved their research facilities from Europe to the United States where advertising has been gradually legalised since the 1980s and where the business climate has recognised the risk/reward trade offs," he said.