Regulating medicines

In such cases, government should step in and help out because the idea is not to kill industry but to make it work.

The discovery that the heart medication Isotab — manufactured by a Karachi-based company — was contaminated and had been responsible for dozens of deaths has caused understandable alarm amongst the public. Yet, we feel that had this crisis been managed better, much of what may soon become the economic fallout could have been avoided. The pharmaceutical industry in Pakistan is small, but growing at a healthy pace and even beginning to export some of its products now. The last thing they needed was a panic like this one. There had been rumours of cancelled export orders and countries reconsidering allowing Pakistani pharmaceutical exports into their markets. Pakistan’s reputation as a producer of reliable drugs is at stake. One bad batch of medicines does not mean that the whole industry is not worth saving and protecting. If we allow the present discourse to devolve into finger-pointing, we could potentially ruin what could be a strong export revenue generator for Pakistan. Each of the protagonists could have acted better. The pharmaceutical company which is now under scrutiny should have acted faster in determining what the problem was and should have recalled the entire stock of the drug as a gesture of proactive goodwill. In the pharmaceutical business, credibility is everything and worth paying for to protect. Meanwhile, the federal and Punjab governments should have acted more responsibly, instead of engaging in a blame game. They should have acted in concert to help prevent the further dissemination of the contaminated drugs.

The fact is that pharmaceutical manufacturing is a dangerous business. Accidents can and do happen and mistakes can and will be made. The most effective response is to be able to quickly determine exactly what went wrong in the manufacturing process or supply chain and fix it. This process requires the collaboration of both the manufacturer and the regulators. The US and the EU are generally good examples of this. There, incidents such as these, but on a smaller scale, have happened, but the industry wasn’t shut down. Rather, the government stepped in and helped out because the idea is not to kill the industry but to make it work and become a provider of safe and affordable medicines.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 4^th, 2012.