FIGHTING the menace of spurious drugs is like playing whack-a-mole while the manufacturing and marketing of those adulterated and fake drugs are going on unabated, reports a local English daily on Tuesday. The reality in the ground has rendered an even darker picture -a problem that has deeper roots due to the negligence of the authorities to address its spread over the years threatening public health initiatives.
Counterfeit or ‘fake’ drugs are unsafe because they are usually low-quality products containing no active ingredients,or contain a wrong dose of active ingredients or, worse still, toxic solvents such as boric acid or rat poison. Therefore such drugs are rarely efficacious to human health and rather a live danger. They can have serious adverse effects. How many deaths are caused by fake medicines is not known, but the dangers are clear and the victims are presumed to be high in number.
World Health organization (WHO) has expressed concern saying counterfeit drugs traditionally have been more used in developing parts of the world like Asia and Latin America, where as many as 30 percent of drugs sold are in fact fake drugs. And the ground reality is that Bangladesh is no different.
Meanwhile, the Bangladesh government run Drug Administration (DA) has utterly failed to deal with the menace of counterfeit medicine. It remains largely a lame duck in a gloomy market situation. It does not have enough surveillance capacity to regulate spurious drug production and marketing. The medicine market at Mitford is the hub of spurious drugs now in the city. More surprisingly almost all the medicine shops at that market are reportedly involved in the dealing of fake drugs, news reports quoted the Superintendent of Drug administration as saying adding his office conducted several drives in the market last year to discover the magnitude of the threat but a lack of manpower is inhibiting regular moved to bring the market under control.
The size of the spurious drugs market is now estimated at Tk 1,500 crore. Around 100 small unauthorized and suspended companies, mostly located on the outskirts of the capital are producing fake drugs for diseases like gastric and heart problems, vitamins, injections, oral salines, anti-cancer and such other deadly diseases. Most of the 1.1 lakh registered pharmacies along with a number of unregistered pharmacies are selling these drugs.
We hold the view that the drug market must be brought under strict supervision of the regulatory authorities from the production level to the retail level while enhancing the monitoring and legal actions against those who are violating the standard practice. Moreover enactment and enforcement of new laws for prohibiting counterfeit drugs is essential. Drug Ordinance of 1982 and the Drug Act of 1940 need to be updated to effectively deal with the new situation. Physicians must also cooperate by not prescribing the fake drugs which are largely known to them. The nation can’t allow spurious drugs to play with the lives of the patients.
