India, WHO and PSM India to collaborate to curb spurious and sub-standard medicines

At an international workshop in New Delhi, it was announced that the Indian government, the World Health Organization and Partnership for Safe Medicine (PSM) India will collaborate to find an effective mechanism to ensure patients’ safety prevails over commercial interest and regain consumer confidence in the existing supply chain for medicines.

India will soon start work on creating a blueprint strategy with a clear-cut timeline to curb growth of spurious and not-of-standard medicines. This will entail a robust detection and authentication mechanism based on modern technologies to identify genuine quality and safe medicines from spurious and unsafe drugs in the supply chain and take prompt action against manufacturers and dealers trading with fake and unsafe medicines and violating India’s existing mandatory standards and provisions of the law under the Drugs & Cosmetics Act, 1940 (amended up to 2008).

“The partners will work closely to develop a blueprint with a specific timeline to design a strategy to implement the use of detection and authentication technologies to make spurious and unsafe medicines easily detectable and take prompt action against all such manufacturers who violate the laws and standards of our country by working closely with the state regulators and law enforcers,” said Bejon Misra, founder director of PSM India.