Many vitamin B6 supplements will be removed from shelves by June 2027 due to increasing cases of B6 toxicity.
Customers will need pharmacist supervision to buy products with more than 50 mg of B6, and anything over 200 mg will require a prescription.
Drug safety researcher Geraldine Moses advises consumers to check their vitamins for hidden B6.
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The Therapeutic Goods Administration will tighten regulation of vitamin B6 after a rise in toxicity cases linked to nerve damage. Now from June 2027, highdose products will require pharmacist supervision while those containing upwards of 200 mg will require a prescription. Geraldine Moses is a drug safety researcher and joins me now. Geraldine Moses, thank you for your time. What’s your reaction to this tightening of regulations? Well, I’m greatly relieved actually. This has been a long time coming as you say and and uh for all the consumers who suffered from vitamin B6 toxicity, it’s validation for their long-term complaints. And on those complaints, I mean, it it comes after this major review. It heard from people reporting severe and sometimes permanent health effects. What were they experiencing? Oh, all kinds of things. It usually starts with um tingling, pins and needles in the periphery, mostly in the hands and the feet. Then it can lead to pain. uh eventually so that’s the sensory effects in the in the hands and feet but then it becomes a motor effect so um people can get weakness and difficulty walking and doing fine motor skills so I’ve engaged with some people who in the end can’t walk at all and B6 I mean it can be a hidden ingredient in some cases would you say people were largely unaware and to that could still be largely unaware of how much they’re actually taking oh absolutely and I think that’s exactly why it’s taken so long to come to this stage that people were unaware and also very unexpected cuz who would think that a vitamin could do this sort of thing? People also have a blind faith that if you take vitamins that the body just knows that it’ll reach some point where it will flush out what you don’t need. And that’s always been a bit of a fairy story. So, this is a great time to sit back and for people to go to their medicine cabinet, look at what they’ve got that the supplements that they’re taking. Does it have B6 in it? and maybe rethink whether they even need it or not cuz certainly some of these products there was no point in B6 being in there in the first place. So these changes and this tightening of regulation that we’re looking at now what will it mean for the consumer u come mid2027 when they go to purchase these products? Well largely it’ll mean that consumers are safer that they won’t be unknowingly at risk of vitamin B6 poisoning. Uh a lot of the problems will be though that pharmacists now have to police this. So, I’m hoping that the TGA will implement some education for pharmacists so that we know in ouries how to manage the request cuz if some people are really bent on getting B6 products, B6 containing products that they’ll now have to approach a pharmacist and have a chat about it and we want to make sure that we can manage those requests appropriately. And what about clearer labeling? Is that on the cards? Oh, I hope so. We finally need some warnings cuz ultimately the manufacturers have never been under any obligation to warn people. There have been warnings on the packaging in Australia for about 2 years. But it’s been sort of gobbledegook for a lot of consumers. They didn’t really know what it meant. So hopefully the warnings now will improve and they’ll the manufacturers will take more responsibility and in what they’re engaging in. And there was push back to these changes. the supplements industry had warned that it would restrict access, place significant cost burdens on manufacturers. Um, firstly, do you believe that will be the case? And what are your thoughts on that? In any case, well, look, I think it’s very true. They now have to reformulate and repackage any product that they’ve got B6 in. But I’m sorry, I don’t feel sorry for them. They they’ve been making plenty of money with uh products that were potentially dangerous. So they just have to accept their responsibility here and go with go with it. As you may know that people have regulated vitamin B6 more strictly in other countries for up to 30 years. So it’s just high time that the companies here played their part in keeping consumers safe. And so it’s a rough 18month lead time there. But I mean can we be largely confident that come mid 2027 people won’t be unwittingly taking too much B6 here in Australia? No, I don’t think we can be confident in that cuz it’s just not something people think about. So, I think we do have to maintain the messaging and I think pharmacists need to step forward and perhaps do more supervision out there in the front shop where so many products are available and people never take just one product do they always say multiple supplements. There’s also vitamin B6, not just in vitamins and minerals, but in uh uh meal replacements and various drinks that you can buy on eBay and on the internet. So, I think we need to keep that messaging going and keep repeating it because it’s just not something that’s in people’s consciousness. Drug safety researcher Geraldine Moses, great to have you with us. Thank you. Thank you.
