Speakers stressed on good drug manufacturing practices.
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PESHAWAR September 26: Speakers at a workshop Sunday urged drug manufacturing firms to adopt good manufacturing practices for the production of high quality medicines and promotion of traditional drugs. Dr Farzana Malik, Chief National Coordinator, Drug Control and Traditional Medicines Division said resources were fast shrinking indicating a reversion to traditional medicines which needed to start preparation from now. “By doing this, we can save major portion of our foreign exchange consumed by the import of costly materials for manufacturing of non-traditional medicines,” she said. The workshop entitled “Adoption of Good Manufacturing Practices and Quality Assurances”, jointly organised by the World Health Organisation, ministry of Health and National Institute of Health, Islamabad here. Ms Malik said traditional drugs, such as homeopathic and herbal (unani) were effective when manufactured according to the international standard. She said the world’s population would reach 12 billion by 2050 and it would be difficult for the people to purchase the costly allopathic medicines. She said a single drug was manufactured at the cost $ 500-700 million over a period of 12 to 15 years. She said many effective drugs were being manufactured, but all had some sorts of side-effects, while the traditional drugs could be manufactured at low cost because the raw material for these was available in abundance. “We could get highly good results if we started scientific work on traditional drugs”, she said and added that laws of registration of drugs was of paramount importance to check the quality. She said that in the wake of rapid depletion of oil, forest, water and other natural resources, the manufacturers would find it hard to get the raw materials for synthetic drugs. Dr Amanullah Bismal, Syed Ashraf Kamal, Shakir Zia, Dr Muhammad Zeeshan Danish, Dr Hamad Ahmed, Dr Muhammad Ali Chaudhry, Dr Sanaullah Khan and Sardar Mohammad Rafiq also spoke on the occasion. They said new synthetic drugs caused numerous diseases, but were proved ineffective against malaria in Thailand, TB in Porgutgal and Japan etc. They also mentioned about the Avian bird flue that caused alarm in 1997 followed by Nepar virus two years later.Extreme cautioned must be exercised in manufacturing of drugs and be handled by experts and qualified people from manufacturing to the retail level, they said. They said every drug had drastic repercussions, some very quick reactions that killed the recipients, while other had late consequences on human health. They urged for modern research to use the natural bounties for the benefits of the humankind. This would also generate an atmosphere of health competition among the manufacturers that will ultimately lead to the marketing of top quality drugs. |