ISLAMABAD: Medicines sold in the country will henceforth bear bar codes on their package for consumers to distinguish them from spurious drugs.

State Minister for Information and Broadcasting Maryam Aurangzeb disclosed this emerging from a federal cabinet meeting which approved the decision on Wednesday.

“It (the decision) will be implemented in different phases,” she told media persons. “Moreover, the cabinet also approved amending the Drug Act to ensure availability of quality drugs in the country,” she said.

Her Ministry of National Health Services (NHS) and its ancillary department, the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (Drap), had been working on introducing the “bar code system” for almost two years in order to eradicate sale of spurious drugs and over-pricing.

Their final proposal was included in the agenda of Wednesday’s cabinet meeting.

Introduction of the global unique identification code system will enable any buyer having a smart phone to verify a medicine, and its price. Since the bar code will be able track the movement of a medicine in the supply chain, it will also help recall a medicine in case of a complaint.

Chief Executive Officer of Drap Dr Muhammad Aslam believes that once the project is launched most of the medicine-related complaints will be addressed.

“Just like the bar-coded items of daily use in departmental stores, the two dimensional bar codes that the pharmaceutical companies will have to print on the packets of medicines will be detectable by smart phones,” he told Dawn.

“Smart phones will have to download free software to scan the bar code of their medicine packet. That will be a matter of few minutes and the scanning of a few seconds for the buyer to satisfy himself about the medicine,” he said.

“Purchasers will get all the information - name of the medicine, its maker, batch number, expiry date and price - to verify the drug. The software will help both the buyer and seller to satisfy that the drug is genuine as it would not identify bar code of any spurious medicine,” he said.

“It will also help address quickly complaints like mixing of unwanted chemicals in the drug or it being tainted by fungus, and remove or recall them,” said the Drap CEO.

Dr Aslam said that bar code system will help the government hospitals, which purchase large consignments of drugs, to keep a check and control on the expiry, availability of medicines in their inventory.

While replying to a question, he said that initially the introduction of bar codes will be optional for the drug manufacturers. But after six months they will have to implement it on secondary level and after two years it will be compulsory to implement it on primary level.

While during the secondary level, pharmaceutical companies will have to print bar codes on the packages of tablets, syrups etc, at the primary level the companies will do that on the bottles of syrup and strips.

“They were demanding three years for implementing the scheme but we decided to give them six month for them to exhaust their already printed packets and to get the equipment for bar coding,” he said.

Dr Aslam suggested that citizens who don’t have smart phones take help of the owner of the medical store or any other person in verifying the medicine.

Published in Dawn, April 13th, 2017