Fake drugs a new challenge for Kashmir Society to combat

Sadaf Khursheed, KNB
Srinagar, Jan 20: Recently news came to front in which the newborn babies were given expired injections at one of the leading maternity hospitals in Kashmir Lal Ded. Be it the ignoring this fact or racket of fake drugs in Kashmir its people who always suffer.
The fake drug market is estimated at $200 billion by the world customs organizations and 30percent of drugs sold in developing nations are branded drugs which are counterfeited as reported by World Health Organization (WHO).
According to an estimate, 50 percent drugs consumed by people in Kashmir are substandard and even the life-saving drugs Amoxicillin and Ceftriaxone supplied to the government hospitals are unsafe. In fact, the whole drug market in Kashmir is flooded with these drugs.



The survey conducted by National Institute of Biologicals (NIB), Noida said that considerable amount of drugs sold in Kashmir were found not of standard quality both in hospitals as well as in the open market.
The Kashmir Doctors association says that less then 1percent of drugs supplied to Kashmir are being checked and what is more dangerous is that the doctors prescribe these medicines despite knowing the health hazards.
In a speech by a noted Cardiologist, Dr. Naresh Tehran in 2012 in Srinagar termed Kashmir as the hub of spurious drugs in India and urged to government to take immediate steps to stop the distribution of these drugs and also urged the private companies to conduct a survey about these medicines. However, 6 years have passed since and there seems no effort from the government to stop all this in Kashmir.
The much-hyped “drug policy” has remained to papers only and the directions of the government some years back to prescribe the salt names only seems nowhere in practice.
In 2017 an inspection conducted by the Drugs and food control Organization in Kashmir under 7086 inspections, 36 out of 1096 samples were found of “Not Standard Quality”.
Kashmir is being targeted more by the literate and educated criminals than by any other thing.