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TheIndonesia.id - Indonesian Drug and Food Control Agency (BPOM) announced that it had taken down hundreds of thousands of promotional links and ads for unregulated traditional medicines and health supplements that are being sold online.
Acting deputy for drug and food supervision at BPOM Mohamad Kashuri revealed that from 2021, more than 400,000 links to advertised medicines that had yet to meet the requirements have been taken down in an effort to protect consumers.
“We took down 286,844 links in 2021 as well as 126,331 links from January to April 2022,” Kashuri said on Friday, May 27, as reported by Antara.
He said after BPOM was able to detect the links, it then submitted recommendation to the Ministry of Communication and Informatics to erase them as they failed to meet the requirements in Indonesia.
Generally, the violation committed by advertisers is using misleading narrative as well as distributing and selling products without permit.
According to deputy for traditional medicines, health supplements, and cosmetics supervision at the Agency, Reri Indriani, one of the many claims advertised by these sellers is a product’s ability to kill coronavirus.
“We’ve agreed that any claim related to the product must be backed with scientific data,” Indriani said.
She added that 80.2 percent of violations related to online ads for traditional medicines and health supplements were committed by distributors and not producers.
Furthermore, about 61 percent of these ads were found on marketplace, and the majority of violators were micro-and-small enterprises.
“BPOM is on a mission to protect the public from drug and food risks, including traditional medicines and health supplements that don’t meet the requirements and [sell] misleading information,” head of BPOM Penny Lukito concluded.
