At a time when quality of Indian medicines is being questioned, a WHO agency has found that only 2% of the medical products in Southeast Asia, including India, were substandard or spurious against a global figure of 10.5%.<\/p>\n
Effectively, it means medicines and medical products available in India are safer than what is available in American and European markets.<\/p>\n
Nearly 10.5% of the samples collected by WHO\u2019s Global Surveillance and Monitoring System for substandard and falsified medical products (GSMS) between 2013-17 failed quality test, says the report released on Tuesday. It defines falsified medical products as those that misrepresent identity, composition or source.<\/p>\n
In the past spotlight has largely been on lifestyle medicines such as slimming tablets, the WHO findings show that everything \u2014 from cancer medicines to contraception, antibiotics to vaccines \u2014 faces a quality problem across the world.<\/p>\n
Substandard drugs and vaccines up the risk of several diseases becoming difficult to treat and the world left grappling with antimicrobial resistance, which is a growing concern.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is clear evidence that resistance to the most important antimalarial medicine, artemisinin, first appeared in a part of the world where at one point between 38 and 90% of the artemisinin medicines on the market were substandard or falsified,\u201d says the report.<\/p>\n
Nearly 1,500 cases from across the world, including India, were reported to the surveillance team. The magnitude of the problem could be bigger as not all countries reported cases.<\/p>\n
The growing global trade in medicines has also opened door to drugs, vaccines and other medical products that do not meet quality standards and are even toxic at times.<\/p>\n
Online pharmacies that are fast gaining popularity \u2014 in the US alone 19 to 26 million people now buy medicines online \u2014 also pose a threat, as it makes it easier to push poor quality drugs into even the best regulated markets.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of the security features we have introduced for our products include bar coding for track and trace, hologram and tamper-proof plastic trays with locking system for pre-filled syringe products,\u201d said Dr Krishna Ella, CMD, Bharat Biotech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At a time when quality of Indian medicines is being questioned, a WHO agency has found that only 2% of the medical products in Southeast Asia, including India, were substandard or spurious against a global figure of 10.5%. Effectively, it means medicines and medical products available in India are safer than what is available in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11624,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11625,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11623\/revisions\/11625"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}