- Saturday, March 01, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
In a revelation that would raise concern, a study of samples taken from factories by government inspectors has said that nearly three per cent of drugs routinely taken by Indians for ailments such as hypertension, bacterial infections and allergies are “substandard”, The Guardian reported.
Officials in the country have been conducting random inspections at factories following a scandal over alleged links of Indian-made cough syrups to deaths of children in other countries such as The Gambia and Uzbekistan.
While the “substandard” rating does not mean that the drugs are intrinsically harmful, but they can worsen ailments, help them spread or make them resistant towards drugs, the report added.
It also said that in the latest inspection covering March, nearly 1,500 samples were taken from plants across India and 48 or approximately three per cent, were found to be “not of standard quality”.
However, the findings were an improvement over January and February, when five per cent of the samples were found to be sub-standard.
One sample that returned a substandard reading was for Telmisartan, a hypertension drug.
Nitin Gupta, a retired physiotherapist in Delhi, said his suspicions about the quality of medicines in India were made worse by the recent government studies.
“I’ve always made a point of getting the branded Telmisartan for my high blood pressure because I don’t trust the generic version but now, with this report, it seems even that isn’t a safe bet,” he was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
According to Telmisartan’s manufacturer Glenmark, the sample was counterfeit and not manufactured by Glenmark, the report said.
India’s ministry of health and family welfare has sent inspectors across the country to deal with poor manufacturing practices since last year’s scare over exports of children’s cough syrups.
In 2022, the World Health Organization flagged cases in Uzbekistan and countries in Africa of minors’ deaths being linked to their consumption of cough syrups made in India.
In the US, too, a deadly outbreak of a drug-resistant bacteria has been linked to eye drops made in India.
As of March, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had identified 68 patients with a rare strain of an infection. Three people have died while eight have suffered vision loss.
Four have had their eyes surgically removed.
The US Food and Drug Administration said in a report published earlier in April that Global Pharma, an Indian manufacturer, had violated several safety regulations at its factory in Chennai in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, following an inspection carried out in February-March.
