Foot-dragging on national drug policy continues

The country is yet to have an updated national drug policy even five years after initiation of it due to bureaucratic procrastination.
The delay has put on hold many important actions necessary to improve the quality of drugs and their availability at an affordable cost.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) took the initiative in 2010 to update the drug policy following the death of a number of children following their intake of counterfeit Paracetamol suspension in 2009 in the country.
Dhaka Shishu Hospital and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University Hospital found that 27 children died in the year following intake of spurious drugs. It pointed to the anomalies in the sector.
According to officials, the Director General of Drug Administration (DGDA) prepared a draft of the national drug policy in 2012. Then the DGDA shared it with stakeholders seeking their opinions.
It completed the draft in 2014 after accommodating recommendations of the stakeholders and sent it to the MoHFW on June 7, 2015. The ministry later in January last held a meeting with the DGDA on it, sources said.
The ministry then sent back the draft to the DGDA for completing more necessary procedures.
The draft has now been lying with the ministry since April last as the ministry is expected to initiate a process for sending it to the cabinet for approval.
The country's first national drug policy was formulated in 1982 and then updated in 2005 with a target to ensure adequate supply and availability of essential quality drugs in affordable prices.
The policy, however, could not meet the requirement of local and international pharmaceutical markets. Resultantly some drug makers seized the opportunity to produce and market sub-standard medicines in the country.
There was hardly any control over prices of essential drugs or over-the-counter drugs in the country. Neither in the policy was any guideline on how to expand other areas of alternative medicines like Ayervedic, Unani, homeopathic and bio-chemical products as well as veterinary drugs.
Health ministry sources said efforts were there to draft the latest drug policy to make it pro-people by taking into account all issues concerning health and industries.
They said the authorities felt the necessity to revise the drug policy to increase the supervision on pharmaceutical companies, quality control of their products and expand export markets with international certifications following a faster growth of the sector.
However, sources said a section of people are there trying to influence formulation of the pro-people drug policy causing the unnecessary delay.
They said for that reason the first committee took more than two years to prepare the first draft of the policy. It was revised twice -- in 2011 and 2012.
Ministry sources, however, said the MoHFW had to do extensive work on the first draft and took several years to make it time-befitting.
It is now alleged that despite efforts the time was killed to serve the purpose of the vested quarters, as the policy was aimed at restricting unethical marketing, media advertisement and campaigns and multilevel marketing of many drugs.
Despite the country's pharmaceutical market having the capacity to surpass the market size of Tk 160 billion, there are allegedly the lack of capacity to check manufacturing and marketing of counterfeit medicines apart from the absence of testing laboratory, speedy completion of clinical trials and a mechanism to assess adverse drug reaction.
DGDA Director Mohammad Ruhul Amin, however, refuted the allegation. He said the draft national drug policy has been formulated to provide the nation the best ever policy for ensuring quality medicines, stopping misuse and excessive use of medicines and exploring new avenues of marketing pharmaceutical products at home and abroad.
The time was taken to make it acceptable, he told the FE at his office. Bangladesh has already earned reputation in manufacturing quality products and has been able to expand the export market to 123 countries from 97 within a year or two, he added. Almost 97 per cent medicines are now produced in the country.
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