LAHORE, Sept 5: Some 50 per cent of cola drinks being sold in the city fail basic laboratory test conducted to assess their fitness for human consumption.

Health department’s public analyst Qamar Shaheen told participants in a Civic Forum meeting on Tuesday that the bottled colas either had contaminated water or contained particles besides the proportionate of ingredients was not found according to standards.

“At present, we have no facilities to check things other than the particles, especially the micro-organisms, that is an advanced stage,” she said.

The state of affairs regarding loose pack tea was not different as 50 per cent of the commodity available for sale was spurious.

Lahore District Quality Control Board secretary Dastgeer Ahmad Bhatti said on the directive of the Supreme Court, medicines of three companies were got tested and 23 were found spurious and as many substandard.

He said spurious medicines did not at all contain actual ingredients, while the substandard drugs had not the standard quantity of materials. He said the federal government decided drugs quality, while the provincial authorities monitored the provision of the medicines according to the standards.

Health department deputy secretary Dr Naseer Ahmad Raja said presently there were two food-testing laboratories in Lahore and Multan. He said four posts of food inspectors had been lying vacant in Lahore for the past many years, but now the city had eight inspectors. Half were already working, while a notification for another four had been issued. “The recently notified are ex-officio food inspectors, and are qualified to collect samples for testing,” he said.

Mobile food testing laboratories were being set up in the province, while committees had also been constituted at tehsil level to check the quality of drugs in rural areas.

The government was also actively contemplating to revise the pure food rules. Half of the rules had been vetted after at least a five-hour discussion on every item, involving the manufacturers, especially multinationals, besides law, industries department officers and other stakeholders.