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Farm-Scape, Episode 2252

The Canadian Animal Health Institute is calling on Ottawa to develop a regulatory framework to support commercial development of safe effective veterinary natural health products.

As with in human health there is a growing interest in the animal health field in the use of functional foods, foods that can improve physiological function and may reduce chronic disease and in nutraceuticals which contain isolates of purified ingredients from food.

Canadian Animal Health Institute president Jean Szkotnicki notes everyone is looking for new ways to provide good health and well being for animals but often the science and technology, or innovation, is in advance of the regulation and you need legislation to allow for independent evaluation of the safety and quality of these products.

We are somewhat behind from what the European union has done and Australia has done. They do have some regulatory framework.

We're now talking about have a regulatory framework attached to the natural health product regulation whereby there would be a veterinary division so that the functional foods and nutraceuticals could be reviewed by VDD (Veterinary Drugs Directorate) along with other products like vitamins and minerals and homeopathic products as currently our Canadian natural health product division of Health Canada reviews and as well the CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) reviews ingredients and products for feed that can be used in the manufacture of feed for safety and quality and I think there will be discussions with them, are there ways to broaden the categorization and manage the evaluation process."

Szkotnicki is confident there is a future for functional foods and nutraceuticals in animal health but there is a need to ensure that the regulatory process does not become so slow and unpredictable that it discourages investment in the development of these products.

Staff Farmscape.Ca