The Punjab government has sought help of pharmaceutical industry and experts for the elimination of menace of spurious medicines. Sources told Business Recorder here on Wednesday that Punjab Chief Minister Mian Shahbaz Sharif had taken serious notice of the business of spurious medicines.
He has already constituted three special task forces for curbing spurious medicines. Dr Farrukh Javed is heading the task force for southern Punjab, while Dr Saeed Elahi and Tanvir Aslam Malik will head the task forces for central and northern Punjab, respectively.
According to the sources, these task forces would hold meetings with the Provincial Health Secretary on weekly basis, while the Chief Minister would himself preside over a meeting of the task forces on monthly basis. The head of the task force for central Punjab had invited suggestions from pharma industry to root out the menace of spurious medicines, said the sources.
In pursuance of the directions of the Chief Minister, a crackdown is being launched in the province to root out the business of spurious medicines. Sources said all divisional commissioners, members of the task forces and departments concerned had been asked to cooperate with the task forces in the noble cause of elimination of heinous business of spurious medicines, which was taking lives of innocent people.
All the concerned departments, they said, had been asked to move forward without any fear against the elements engaged in this evil business. The sources said vice-chancellor of the University of Health Sciences (UHS) Professor Malik Hussain Mubbashar said those new and costly Western drugs and medicines were not helping the people.
The multinational pharmaceutical industry was intending to turn the country into a nation of chemical zombies, who suffered from the toxic side effects of taking dozens of prescriptions in combination, he added. He said that it was not an exaggeration to call this a "medical holocaust" or "neo-colonialism."
"The multinational companies seem determined to dose the entire population with as many simultaneous prescriptions as possible, as long as it generates profits for them. "Ethics are nowhere in the pharmaceutical industry these days: it's all about money, profits, power and control", he said while addressing the UHS students and faculty in a seminar, here on Wednesday.
He was of the view that it was a case of aggressive marketing by sponsoring foreign tours and throwing lavish dinners and banquets for doctors," he added. He emphasised that cost-effective drugs were still the best option for poor patients in this part of the world, adding that everything from the West was not necessarily the best.
Dr Um-e-Salma Rahim of Institute of Living Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, USA, while delivering a lecture on pharmacogenetics, said that the discovery and development of new drugs were expensive and risky, as most failed in early clinical trials, with a failure rate of around 97-99 per cent being common.
She further said the pharmacogenetics could help reduce high failure rates and development costs by identifying potential responders and non-responders to a drug at an early stage, using genetic variants that were markers of drug efficacy. She was of the view that the ultimate goal was to be able to tailor medical treatments to individuals. Dr Rahim also called for discouraging cousin marriages in Pakistani society to protect the health of future generations from genetic disorders.
Head of UHS Human Genetics Department Professor Aslam Khan said that in a research conducted in eight villages of Punjab, it was found that 40 percent of the population was married to their first cousins, 20 percent to second cousins, 20 percent to blood relatives and the remaining 20 per cent within the same caste. He further said that such marriages frequently resulted in the offsprings who were not physically or mentally fit.