DRAP chief urges pharma giants to catch ‘black sheep’

Karachi

The pharmaceutical industry needs to expel the black sheep within its ranks to avoid raids and investigations by law enforcement agencies. There are people in these companies who are involved in criminal activities ranging from smuggling to sale of counterfeit drugs, and there needs to be concrete action against all such elements, stated the chief of the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan, Dr Muhammad Aslam, on Friday.

Addressing a stakeholders’ roundtable on access to medicine and patient safety, Dr Aslam urged pharmaceutical giants to adopt a productive approach in provision of medicines to patients since access to ‘quality and affordable’ medicines was the right of every patient in Pakistan. However, he said, price fixing the job of federal government, not the manufacturers.

He said every year $400 billion were spent on counterfeit and spurious drugs across the world.

DRAP CEO said about 400 billion US dollar counterfeit and spurious drugs business carried out throughout the world every year.  

A CEC member of the Pakistan Chemists & Druggists Association (PCDA), Saif-ur-Rehman, said government understood the issues being faced by the pharmaceutical companies in manufacturing  drugs and expressed the hope that it will make an effort to resolve them.

The central chairman of Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association (PPMA), Hamid Raza, claimed prices of medicines were lower in Pakistan as compared to other countries. He urged the government to control just the drug prices rather than controlling the whole industry. 

He said pharmaceutical companies were serving people by manufacturing medicines but there were some serious issues requiring to be addressed on priority basis.

Earlier in his welcome address, president of Justice Helpline Nadeem Shaikh Advocate said access to quality medicine was a fundamental right of every patient.

The finance secretary of Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) centre, Dr SM Qaisar Sajjad, said prices of medicines should be affordable for the people but unfortunately it was not happening in Pakistan. He lamented that even drugs were not available for patients in public sector hospitals.