Obviously not true, but a series of recent incidents have gotten the public skeptical about Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety’s (MFDS) independent pharmaceutical review capacity. Many of recent safety issues have surfaced from overseas, and none of them were first found in Korea.

Merely in a day, the ministry decided to copy the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) official action to ban sales of an appetite suppressant, Belviq (lorcaserin), due to its cancerous risk. While FDA has reported Belviq’s risk of causing cancer last month and issued a recommendation to pullback the item from market on Feb. 13, MFDS not only did not have a chance to review clinical data that raised the issue