Botanical supplements occupy a regulatory grey area between food and medicine within the European Union, a situation that has given rise to a series of interrelated challenges. This paper highlights regulatory dysfunctions across several dimensions: definitional voids in EU food law, unclear food–medicine classification boundaries, fragmented market access rules, and inadequate safety monitoring systems. These regulatory gaps impose costs on business operators, restrict consumer access, and result in uneven protection across Member States. The article also focuses on safety concerns, which are, however only one element of this broader puzzle. To address such systemic difficulties, the paper proposes the introduction of harmonised pre-market notification and post-market surveillance mechanisms, with a specific focus on botanical supplements. These measures could help reconcile market accessibility with stronger consumer protection while supporting innovation. Admittedly, they may not resolve all regulatory challenges, particularly the thousands of health claims that remain on hold. Nevertheless, they might offer a practical foundation for addressing long-term, often overlooked safety concerns related to botanicals. It remains to be seen whether they could also contribute to resolving the interconnected regulatory issues in this sector, potentially paving the way for broader reform.

Despite sophisticated pre-market scientific assessment frameworks, the EU lacks systematic post-market surveillance for botanical food supplements, creating a critical regulatory imbalance. This analysis examines real-world safety incidents that demonstrate how fragmented national responses and inadequate monitoring systems fail to protect consumers effectively. Several Member States have developed nutrivigilance initiatives yet remain uncoordinated and insufficient for union-wide risk detection. The existing framework exhibits a fundamental contradiction: Article 8 procedures under Regulation (EC) no 1925/2006 require scientific evidence of harm to justify restrictions, but no harmonised mechanism exists to systematically collect such evidence. Current tools like RASFF capture acute compositional violations but cannot monitor chronic health effects or supplement–medicine interactions that characterise modern botanical supplement risks. This paper argues that mandatory EU-wide nutrivigilance represents the missing institutional link needed to transform reactive crisis management into proactive risk prevention. A harmonised system built on centralised reporting, standardised causality assessment, and formal regulatory follow-through mechanisms would provide the evidence base necessary to develop Union-wide restrictive lists and support coherent enforcement under existing legal frameworks. Such reform would address the most glaring gap in EU food safety architecture and provide legal certainty for industry operators across the internal market.

Coccidiosis is well known as an expensive, parasitic disease for the poultry industry worldwide. The disease causes real economic losses by causing poor growth and feed efficiency in broilers even leading to high mortality. Consequently, large amounts of money are being spent on vaccination and inclusion of anticoccidial drugs into diets. In recent years, development of resistance to coccidiostats, elevated costs of systematic vaccination and increasing consumer demand for ′natural′ food products has fuelled the development of natural, plant-based alternatives for coccidial control in poultry farming. The anti-coccidial properties of numerous natural products such as Ageratum conyzoides extract (billy goat weed), green tea, maslinic acid, extracts of Polygonum bistorta (Anjbar) and Agele marmelos (Bael), Artemisia sieberi, Artemisia absinthium, the leaves of Neem (Azadirachta indica), Artemisia annua and Aloa vera-based supplements have been reported. This article summarises the experimental knowledge relating to the efficacy, possible modes of action and different aspects of application of botanical supplements as feed additives for the treatment of poultry diseases, especially coccidiosis.