The Gujarat Food & Drugs Control Administration (FDCA) is stepping up its efforts to stop manufacturing of six drugs recently banned by the Union Health Ministry.
In a notification issued last month the ministry had banned the pediatric usage of Nimesulide, a popular pain relief drug, besides banning Cisapride, PPA, human placental extract based drugs, Sibutramine with immediate effect. Following this, the Drugs Controller General of India initiated the process of withdrawing permission to market few other potentially harmful drugs from the market.
Gujarat FDCA started scanning for manufacturing facilities that manufactured these banned drugs in the state.
"We found that there were around 2188 product licenses for manufacturing Nimesulide in the state, 1082 licenses for PPA, a common cold medicine, 36 licenses for Cisapride, and 90 for Sibutramine. We have already issued notices to manufacturers to stop production of these drugs. We have not shut down any production facility as any manufacturer would have multiple licenses pertaining to different molecules or brands that would be manufactured at the same spot.", said H G Koshia, commissioner of the Gujarat FDCA.
There are around 3000 licensed drug manufacturing units in Gujarat, for allopathic, homeopathic and ayurvedic medicines, and around 1.27 lakh product licenses for different molecules and brands.
Industry sources confirmed that all major manufacturers in the state were into manufacturing these common cold and pain relief medicines.
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Koshia also added that as Nimesulide has been banned for children under the age of 12 years, the FDCA is now in the process of identifying and hence blocking the manufacture of any pediatric dosage of the drug in the form of syrups etc. Two more drugs, gatifloxacine and tegaserod are also likely to be banned soon. The expert committee of the office of the DCGI has already recommended ban on two such drugs. However, the ban is yet to be notified by the health ministry. Meanwhile, it may be mentioned here that the FDCA has withdrawn all measles vaccines under the brand name Abhay-M belonging to batch number MES 10/10 manufactured by the human biological institute, a division of Hyderabad-based Indian Immunological Ltd from the market. Four infants have died on Wednesday. The Gujarat FDCA has already withdrawn 227 vaccines belonging to batch number MES 10/10 from across the state. Whereas they have collected samples from 13 other batches and have sent them to Central Research Institute (CRI) Kasauli for further testing.
Koshia informed, "The government has set up a high level committee under the health department to investigate the matter. Till then we have suspended the programme to avoid further complications. As of now, we do not know the reason for the death and are waiting for the laboratory reports. We have already informed the DCGI and the Drugs Control Adminstration Hyderabad about the same and an enquiry is on.”