The economic cost of substandard drugs

Last week, two pieces of news were widely reported by most Indian media outlets.

- PROSENJIT DA'ITA

The first was that a case had been registered against a group of people who were supplying fake drugs - including antibiotics - to government hospitals in Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand. The pills and tablets supplied were mostly composed of talcum powder and starch. There were no active pharmaceutical ingredients or formulations in them at all.

Almost immediately after this news was reported, another equally worrying piece of news emerged. A recent survey by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) found that 50 commonly used medications available in the market - including prominent antibiotics, antacids, antipyretics and antihypertensives - were substandard. Some of these drugs mentioned in the survey were marketed and/or manufactured by fairly prominent drug firms, including Hindustan Antibiotics, Alkem, Torrent and several others. A few of the brand samples that failed the test were market leaders in their respective categories.

State drug officers in India conduct random sampling of medicines available in the market every month and the CDSCO has consistently found many from these samples to be substandard. This was not the first report saying multiple samples had been found to be substandard - though it was more detailed than similar reports that had appeared earlier.