Interview with Dr. Paolo Mosconi by Romina Alessandri of the editors of Science and Knowledge

We read the opinion of Dr. Paolo Mosconi, homeopathic doctor on the question concerning the possibility that homeopathic remedies disappear from Italian pharmacies.

During the last conference of the COMILVA association in Rimini (28 March 2015) it focused the public's attention on a serious problem: the obligation to register the Homeopathic Drugs which could lead to the disappearance of the majority of those now available. Can you explain better what is happening and what could happen?

The subject is complex and cannot be treated in the necessarily brief span of an article, therefore I will list the essential points that can be explored later and also individually by the interested reader.

At the center of the scene is the Italian Medicines Agency (AIFA), a body of the Ministry of Health that deals with the control of construction procedures and the marketing of all drugs on the national territory.

The admission of drugs to trade is subject to a registration procedure completely managed by AIFA. After all the legislative sedimentation on the subject of Homeopathic Medicine with attempts to regulate it in a comprehensive manner, today there is a European directive, the n. 2001/83 / CE, which regulates the matter, to which Italy complied in 2006 with an arbitrary and completely erroneous interpretation and execution by AIFA (acknowledgment of registrations for the whole of 1997 and annual update for drugs added in subsequent years: absurd tax increases, up to 1000% compared to the costs of registration in other European states and with other loopholes for registration that the European directive does not provide).

As for homeopathy, the center of the matter is that none of the AIFA officials has the slightest competence nor preparation or qualification on Homeopathic Medicine and on the procedures for constructing Homeopathic Remedies or functional drugs.

In reality, AIFA erroneously applied the principles of registration of drugs and Allopathic pharmaceutical companies to homeopathic remedies.

It should be noted tragically that the same chaotic situation for the management of functional medicine is found at the level of the European Medicines Agency (from the English European Medicines Agency, EMA, previously known as the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products EMEA) which is the European Union Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products .

It is also true that EMA sets directives which it applies to the respective national agencies. This state of affairs has allowed and produced a great confusion in the management of controls on the production of homeopaths and functional drugs .

In practice, AIFA inspectors carry out inspections on procedures that they do not know and officials decide on activities that are equally unknown to them.

In this way it turned out that the registration costs (real heavy taxes) for the Homeopathic and functional drugs were equal to those of the allopaths, and in an absolutely disproportionate way compared to those of all the other European States (as noted above).

The registration costs claimed by AIFA have soared unjustifiably to such an extent that they are impossible to deal with for companies producing Homoeopathic Remedies, which will be forced to stop the distribution of remedies in Italy when the law promoted by AIFA, if this will be ratified by the Ministry of Health and approved by Parliament. The deadline is the end of 2015.

In practice, all Italian companies have already stopped the production and distribution of the majority (up to 70%) of the Homoeopathic Remedies (with serious economic damage that has put them in serious pain, forcing many of them to close).

Foreign companies with production units in Italy have closed their factories with consequent dismissals estimated at 1500 work units (1500 families).

A very hard blow to a sector, the homeopathic one, which has always been in constant positive growth and is now unexpectedly led to a very serious crisis, up to the threat of closure even for the most solid companies.

It is reasonable to suppose that this incomprehensible maneuver has a direction and is aimed at damaging the Italian homeopathy in a non-repairable way.

The complete article will be published on Science and Knowledge n. 52 due out in May 2015.