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In response to media enquiries concerning the Undesirable Medical Advertisements Ordinance (UMAO), the Director of Health, Dr PY Lam, gave the following statement today (May 27):
The aim of the legislation is to protect members of the public from being misled by advertisements into using medicine, surgical appliance or treatment for treating or preventing certain diseases listed in the schedules of the ordinance, resulting in delaying proper diagnosis and treatment by medical practitioners.
There is no question about selective prosecution action. The Department of Health follows a set of standard procedure for screening daily newspapers and magazines and referring suspected cases to the police for investigation and prosecution. This set of procedures complies with the ISO 9001: 2000 quality management system standard and has been certified by the Hong Kong Quality Assurance Agency in 2005.
Under the standard procedures, a warning letter, together with a copy of the relevant section of the legislation and a telephone number for enquiries, will be issued to the distributor of the product and publisher of the advertisement suspected to have contravened the ordinance.
Only when the warning is ignored, the case will be referred to the police for investigation and prosecution action.
In 2005, the Department of Health issued 4 117 warning letters. Out of the 77 cases referred to Police, 22 involved media organisations, comprising seven newspapers and two magazines.
To enable the trade to better understand the requirements of the legislation, the department has published in its website (http://www.psdh.gov.hk) the Guideline on the Undesirable Medical Advertisements Ordinance, the Guideline on Undesirable Medical Advertisements (Amendment) Ordinance 2005.
A seminar on UMAO was held for the trade on March 15, 2006 and was attended by more than 100 people from the industry.
The legislation does not provide for an approval system for publishing advertisements for purposes other than official medical sources. Nonetheless, it provides for an exception that health advice coming from the Director of Health shall not be subject to the restrictions under the ordinance.
Ends/Saturday, May 27, 2006
Issued at HKT 13:38
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