KARACHI: Documentation urged to stop spurious drugs
KARACHI, May 4: Participants at a meeting urged the government to reflect a zero-level tolerance towards the availability of spurious and counterfeit drugs.
It also urged all concerned stake holders including patients to demand cash memos from retailers for every medicine and vaccine they purchased besides asking doctors to prescribe these in generic names.
Senior medical professionals, pharmacists, representatives of the Ministry of Health, Pakistan Medicine Manufacturers Association, Pakistan Drug Pharma Bureau, Association of Drug Controllers, Pakistan Medical Association and the Helpline Trust in a meeting at the PMA House on Wednesday demanded that the writ of law should be ensured without any discrimination.
Focussing their discussion on the issue of ‘counterfeit/fake drugs’, the participants called for across-the-board documentation of all medicines and medical supplies right from the source i e from the production units till these were purchased by patients.
Dr Ali Ahmed Sial, Deputy Director General, Ministry of Health, Prof Tipu Sultan, Dr Junaid Soomro, Dr Asghar Mehdi, Obaid Ali, Riaz Hussain, Dr Nadeem Irshad, Hameed Maker, Dr Sabiha, Dr Usman Hani, Dr Qaiser Sajjad and others participated in the discussion.
Maintaining that easy and cost-effective availability of quality drugs was not only a basic right but also an issue of life and death for patients, hence, doctors should specifically practice maintaining a record of the drugs prescribed by them with due details of the patient including his/her name, disease and dosage.
Regretting that the existent law, that only qualified pharmacists could run and manage chemist shops, was being blatantly violated without any inhibition, the participants urged the drug controlling authorities to ensure that the rule should be implemented in letter and spirit.
It may be mentioned that yet while licenses were issued, no mechanism existed to see whether there was a qualified pharmacist available at these outlets or not. It was observed that hundreds of pharmacology graduates were passing out from different universities across the country each year and were experiencing unemployment.
The participants stressed adequate enumeration of pharmacists hired at drug stores.
The initiative was said to be adopted at the government level, on immediate basis, with all pharmacies functioning within government health care centres and hospitals to have necessary provision for qualified pharmacists.The inability of concerned agencies to seek due assistance and support from law enforcing agencies for taking stern action against identified manufacturers of spurious drugs was also regretted.
It was stressed that the issue of counterfeit and spurious drugs should be taken on priority basis besides adopting urgent measures on long-term basis to combat the menace, as it was also giving a bad name to the country since there were reports that such drugs were also being exported to other countries.—APP
