NZ authorities advised of crisis only at the 11th hour

New Zealand health officials learned about the Pan Pharmaceuticals recall and suspension just hours before it was announced in Australia - even then the Therapeutic Goods Administration contacted the wrong people.

TGA staff held a teleconference at 12.30pm on Monday with Wellington-based officials from Medsafe, the government agency responsible for the safety of medicines in New Zealand. The news was dramatic - the TGA would be suspending Pan from trading for six months at 4.30pm New Zealand time and recalling hundreds of products.

Because health supplements in New Zealand are treated as food rather than medicines, the Medsafe officials had to tell the TGA they should be talking to the Food Safety Authority (NZFSA). Medsafe informed the NZFSA after the teleconference.

Carole Inkster, the NZFSA's regulatory standards director, yesterday said she wasn't concerned that the New Zealand authorities were told only at the 11th hour. She was confident "if they could have told us they would have" and put the TGA's secrecy down to "commercial sensitivity".

That afternoon, NZFSA staff prepared a media statement, pulled together a list of industry and government people to be contacted and prepared for a meeting with Ministry officials, scheduled for 10.30 the next morning. That meeting divided duties between government agencies and decided the NZFSA would take the lead. After the meeting its staff contacted concerned groups, from the Retailers Association to supermarket chains to the Pharmacy Guild. One of the calls was to Roger Sanderson, a board member of the National Nutritional Foods Association, the umbrella group representing supplement manufacturers and retailers. But the NNFA's president of 18 months, Bill Bracks, was not called, and did not speak to anyone from the NZFSA until he rang Inkster yesterday morning.

The pair estimated 90 per cent of the Pan products in New Zealand had been imported by NNFA members, so Bracks was able to supply information to ensure the Government had contacted all Pan importers and could finally confirm a list of all Pan-manufactured products sold here.



By late Wednesday afternoon, the NZFSA had established that none of the initial 219 products recalled in Australia was on sale in New Zealand. At the same time, however, the TGA was announcing another list of a further 449 products - manufactured by Pan for other companies - to be recalled. The NZFSA knew some of those products were on sale here. It released the list on Thursday morning, accompanied by a press release from Health Minister Annette King ordering all the 449 products recalled. "It is imperative that products on this latest list are taken off the shop shelves. People should stop taking the products contained in this list immediately," the statement read.

By yesterday, while the NZFSA and the NNFA struggled to draw up a definitive list of Pan's products, both were still unclear about the products' possible side-effects. Inkster said they received the full TGA report only on Thursday night and were still not clear what damage the recalled products could do.

Bracks said the TGA's response had been a "gross overreaction", while some dietary supplement retailers and manufacturers took matters into their own hands. Health 2000, Healtheries, Blackmores and Nature's Sunshine all took out newspaper ads reassuring customers.