The Hospital for Sick Children says an “oversight” led its popular online drug safety website for pregnant women to fall into the hands of a company now using it to promote the use of cannabis products in pregnancy.

The hospital ran the Motherisk program as a resource for women and doctors with questions about the safety of medications and other products during pregnancy and breastfeeding. The program and its popular helplines were shut down in April after Sick Kids said it couldn’t find funding to continue the service, a decision that followed a series of scandals.

Motherisk.org currently redirects to a list of articles on using CBD oil, a cannabis product, during pregnancy. Cannabidiol or CBD is a non-intoxicating extract of the cannabis plant.

One article on the website claims that “some expectant mothers use oil because they believe it offers a more natural alternative to risky over-the-counter medications.” It also claims CBD can help with pregnancy cramps, and can “help pregnant women get the rest they need for themselves and their developing babies.”

Sick Kids spokesperson Jessamine Luck says the website domain expired and was released after the program closed.

“This was an oversight and multiple departments within Sick Kids are working to put procedures in place to prevent this type of occurrence in the future,” she said.

“Sick Kids has alerted the public and the medical community that the information currently on Motherisk.org is not endorsed by, and in no way represents, Sick Kids or the former Motherisk Helplines. We are concerned this content will be perceived to have been validated by Sick Kids experts.”

The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, along with other health bodies, recommends that pregnant and breastfeeding women avoid using cannabis. High-quality evidence is still lacking, but some studies have shown that the use of cannabis while pregnant or breastfeeding is associated with increased risk of low birth weight, preterm labour, and brain and behaviour problems.

“Until we have more definitive answers, not using cannabis or CBD during pregnancy or when breastfeeding is the safest option for you and your baby,” the society says.

The articles on the webpage that Motherisk.org redirects to cites research on potential negative effects, but downplays some of it.

The American digital marketing agency that built the website said neither it nor the website’s owners had any knowledge of Motherisk’s significance to Canadians, and were “horrified” to learn of the confusion it might present.

CBD Clinicals bought the domain one or two weeks ago, says Ash Aryal, who works for Digital Spotlight, a company contracted to build the website. Aryal said the owners are taking steps to make it clear Sick Kids is not associated with the new website.

Aryal had questions of his own: “if this was such an important domain, do you know how it even got in the hands of private sellers and why it was let go?”

“Anyone from any country could have picked this up,” he added.

Sick Kids closed the Motherisk program in April, saying “the decision follows years of declining grant funding leading to staff reductions, as well as unsuccessful efforts to secure an alternative host for the program.” The closure of Motherisk, which was founded in 1985, was met with dismay from the public and from doctors and other medical experts.

Though it was a popular and trusted resource, Motherisk had been beset by a series of scandals.

Motherisk’s hair-strand drug and alcohol testing lab was shut down in 2015 after a Toronto Star investigation and an independent review found that it used inadequate, unreliable standards, producing flawed evidence used in child protection and criminal cases. The lab’s director, Dr. Gideon Koren, retired the same year.

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Motherisk’s counselling service, including its telephone helplines and website, continued under new leadership. But in 2018, Sick Kids announced a review of Koren’s research after the Star flagged possible problems in more than 400 of his research papers. The Star found these papers failed to declare conflicts of interest and had perhaps even obscured them, had been inadequately peer-reviewed, and, in a handful of cases, contained lies about the methodology used to test hair for drugs.

Four months later, Motherisk and its helplines closed permanently.

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