New Zealand's official list of suspect dietary supplements and vitamins made by disgraced Australian company Pan Pharmaceuticals failed to include products from major local health company Red Seal Natural Health.
The New Zealand Food Safety Authority updated the information on its website on Saturday but did not make public the omission.
Red
Seal had 26 supplements on its "immediate withdrawal" list and another 11 were advised to not be taken as a "precautionary step", the Red Seal website said yesterday.
Pan's products were first recalled in Australia a week ago following a series of grave safety and quality breaches.
New Zealand consumers had to wait four days before authorities here collated information on Pan products and put out a recall list.
NZFSA director of policy and regulatory standards Carole Inkster described the omission of Red Seal products as an "unfortunate oversight".
"We were working so frantically with data coming in and all sorts of forms. While Red Seal had faxed and emailed its information to us, one person in our office printed it off and assumed others hadn't.
"We did the best we could in the time we had and we really raced to get the very best list up," Ms Inkster said.
The omission was regretted but the public "could have rung our 0800 number", she said.
"We corrected it and it went back up on our website during Saturday and people [calling] the 0800 number were advised of the mistake."
An updated list of about 700 products, including Red Seal, would appear in newspapers tomorrow or Wednesday.
Red Seal managing director Rolfe Hilke did not want to comment on the matter.
Related links: Pan Pharmaceuticals recall
