Marketing Bangladeshi medicines

Maswood Alam Khan from Maryland, USA In a conference on 'Bangladesh Pharmaceutical Industry and Current Issues', held in Dhaka last Saturday and organised by Square Pharmaceuticals, leading entrepreneurs from the local pharmaceutical companies agreed that pharmaceutical industries in Bangladesh have been making great strides in drug manufacturing with an annual growth rate of 15 per cent. They called upon their fellow colleagues and businessmen in the industry to upgrade their plants and ensure quality of products to meet the international standards while enhancing production to meet increasing demands of drugs from home and abroad. They suggested re-examination of policies and procedures as to issuing drug licenses, especially to new companies. They urged the government to set up more testing laboratories throughout the country for intensive monitoring of the quality of medicines in the market so that unscrupulous businessmen cannot exploit the poor and ignorant by foisting them with adulterated and substandard medicines. To their opinion, among the 245 registered pharmaceutical companies there are many companies which do not bother about maintaining quality in producing drugs. There is no denying that the pharmaceutical industries, especially the big ones like Square, Incepta and Beximco have done a world of good in contributing their shares to our medical services by catering to almost 100 per cent of the local demand and reducing the country's dependence on imported medicines. After the promulgation of Drug Control Ordinance in 1982, the development of this sector was commendably accelerated. As a result, some of the companies are exporting medicines to global market, even to some European countries. Sales volume of the pharmaceutical industries in Bangladesh has reached almost Taka 100 billion. The participants in the Saturday's conference have rightly said that our pharmaceuticals need to be upgraded and the quality of our medicines needs to be of international standard. Some observers, I am one of them, must have been surprised by a recommendation made by some entrepreneurs in the conference on allowing the local entrepreneurs to buy or to set up plants outside Bangladesh. Is not it surprising when Bangladesh is struggling with rising unemployment rate, when wages of both white-collar and blue-collar workers are very low in Bangladesh compared to any other developing countries? Why should we allow flight of hard currencies outside Bangladesh for merging with foreign companies located abroad or for setting up new industries on a foreign land? Yes, there were some entrepreneurs in the garments industries in Bangladesh who had set up their factories in some countries such as Laos and Nepal. That was okay in the past. Because, the expertise earned by the entrepreneurs in the garments sector could profitably be utilised in those countries where the labour cost at that time was perhaps lower than that in Bangladesh. But, nowadays, wages have gone up in almost all the neighbouring and developing countries. And it would be suicidal if anyone dreams of undertaking a venture, solely or jointly, to set up a pharmaceutical industry in a developed country, unless one has a bad motive to siphon off our hard-earned foreign currency on the pretext of setting up an industry overseas. Companies may very well open their representative offices anywhere in the world they wish with a view to promoting their products for exportation from Bangladesh. Our pharmaceutical products can better be franchised to foreign companies. What is needed is to boost export of our medicines in any form, fully or partially processed, as China and India are doing for the last few decades. Instead of going for offshore manufacturing of pharmaceutical products we should invite global giants for joint ventures or to set up their pharmaceutical plants on the soil of Bangladesh. American situation: Drugs in America or for that matter in any developed country are prohibitively expensive. Drug cannot be cheap in America because an American company spends a lot of money in developing and marketing a FDA-approved drug. The first step in the development of a drug is the discovery of a new compound and then extensive research into the biological and chemical properties of the compound to determine its effects as well as its safety in human body for treatment. Once the compound is proven to be safe and effective, the company applies to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a license to manufacture and sell the drug. It takes about 7 to 10 years and an average cost of 500 million dollars to develop each new drug. This money is spent before the FDA approves the drug, and if the drug is not approved, the company loses the money. It is little wonder why in America you have to pay one dollar (Taka eighty) for a Paracetamol tablet, a pain reliever, that you can buy for Taka one in Bangladesh. So, medical insurance and prescription medicines are very expensive in America. There are millions of Americans who cannot afford to buy doctor's prescription or costly health insurance and look around for shopping cheaper medicines made in China, Bangladesh or India. In America or in Europe, it would be hard to find a family whose origin is in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka or Pakistan who don't buy life-saving generic medicines from their home countries in the sub-continent and bring those back in suitcases for their own consumption or to give to their close relatives and friends who cannot afford the expensive branded products made in the West. Medicines, made in countries like Bangladesh, are thus saving or prolonging millions of lives in the West. The example of Cipla: India created history a decade back when an Indian pharmaceutical company named "Cipla" produced generic HIV/AIDS drugs that could treat a patient for only US$ 300 a year, far cheaper than the branded product's cost of US$ 10,000 a year that was required to treat a patient. Nowadays, the Indian generic version is even cheaper, below US$ 80. Today, India supplies more than 70 per cent of the HIV/AIDS drugs obtained by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Global Fund and the William J. Clinton Foundation for treating millions of AID/HIV patients in developing countries. Indian government played a great role behind this revolutionary success by liberalising their patent regulations so that pharmaceutical drugs were excluded from product patents, paving the way for local companies to produce generic versions of expensive foreign drugs. Like India, Bangladesh can also earn billions of dollars and at the same time play the role of a life-saver to millions of poor and sick people around the world by producing cheaper generic versions of the expensive patented drugs, provided Bangladesh government liberalises its patent regulations on pharmaceutical products and gives other supports necessary. Bangladesh has already made a positive impact worldwide through its large supplies of readymade garments at affordable price. Similarly, our pharmaceutical industries by upgrading their plants and ensuring the quality of their products to international standard can supply low-cost, good-quality generic medicines around the world after meeting domestic demands. Partially processed raw materials of some of the generic medicines can also be exported from Bangladesh, if export of any particular product, in the form of fully processed medicines, cannot be made possible for reasons like lack of internationally recognised standardisation or due to patent restrictions. Medical tourists: It is heartening to learn that the government has already taken a giant step to strengthen the pharmaceutical sector of Bangladesh by way of establishing Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) Industrial Park at Gazaria, Munshiganj. The Park is scheduled to be operational within 2013. The API Industrial Park will undoubtedly help increase the local production of pharmaceutical products and boost exports to a great extent as most of the pharmaceutical raw materials can be produced and sourced locally. A robust pharmaceutical base, along with proper facilities for medical treatments in local hospitals of international standard in Bangladesh, can open a wide door for another massive opportunity, much more lucrative a sector than the garments or the shrimps, to invite a new genre of tourists who are called "Medical tourists". For more than 100 years Switzerland has been a Mecca to foreigners offering superior health care. Nowadays, those, including Bangladeshis, who cannot afford to stay in Switzerland for retirement as well as medical care, instead go to Thailand for medical checkups and treatments at facilities like Bumrungrad International Hospital at Bangkok. Many emerging nations are developing medical tourism industries. For a tourism industry to thrive in Bangladesh we need not only good medicines, 5-star hospitals and world class physicians; we also need a huge army of nurses. Bangladesh has a unique advantage in this respect--its huge female population. The way Bangladeshi females are helping our garments industries in exporting readymade garments our young females, who have traditionally been supportive to the sick and the elderly in their own families, may be turned into world-class nurses. maswood@hotmail.com