The government's inadequate budget and poor campaign have jeopardised a project aimed to report adverse drug reaction (ADR), sources said.
As per the government's initiative, reporting forms are distributed among the physicians who are supposed to fill it up saying adversity of a drug and send it to the drug office.
Until today, the drug office has received responses from only 140 physicians in more than 18 months' time. Â
When contacted, several physicians said they have no idea about such reporting.
A drug official said they first started distributing ADR forms in 1994 but after some days, it was stopped. Again they started the drive in 2012 and until today, the response is not satisfactory as per expectations.
He said many drugs do not have clinical trials in Bangladesh and it is almost absent for new molecules. So ADR reporting is an important issue for the government to know about drugs' adversity among patients.
Despite the project's importance, the government has no budget allocation and even there is no mandatory direction to the physicians from the Directorate General of Health Services in reporting drugs' adversity to the government.
Most of the doctors keep mum in disclosing the companies' names and their brand names if they get adversity, another drug official said.
Salim Barami, director of the Directorate General of Drug Administration (DGDA) said, "After a long-time discontinuation, we have again started distributing ADR forms among the physicians and so far more than 30 public and private hospitals are in our net."
He said the government is yet to form a special team and set up an office in dealing with adverse reporting. As a result, officials in the drug office are working for this as an additional duty.
Currently, more than 1,400 generic drugs are being re-engineered in Bangladesh in more than 20,000 brand names.
According to a manufacturing source, most of the drugs are time-tested as its clinical trials are already done by the inventing nations.
He said, for many new drugs it is necessary to get adversity reports and though the government has taken the initiative to get feedback from the doctors, it is not working well.
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