In its marketing materials, Butterflies Healthcare claimed that its Viteyes range of dietary supplements could prevent age-related macular degeneration. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) Medicines Borderline Section requested full product information from Butterflies Healthcare in order to assess these claims and concluded that the products fell within the definition of a ‘medicinal product’.
A medicinal product can only be sold with appropriate licenses, and the Viteyes products do not have such licenses.
Butterflies Healthcare has been advised about which claims were unacceptable for these products. Following this advice, the company has begun revising the product material. The company’s UK website has already been changed.
David Carter, manager of the Medicines Borderline Section at the MHRA, underlined the importance of companies ensuring that their products complied with the law.
“Where companies wish to sell products in the UK which are manufactured elsewhere in the world it is very likely that the products and their marketing material will need to be adjusted,” he commented. “In this case the UK supplier is co-operating with the MHRA making statutory action unnecessary. However, if our advice had been sought initially the company could have avoided the trouble and expense of revising and reprinting product labels and marketing material.”