Geisha Kow­lessar

The num­ber sys­tem pro­posed by Health Min­is­ter Dr Fuad Khan to clamp down on coun­ter­feit drugs will not work, says Dr Neil Singh of the Health Ser­vices Unit of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine.Khan, at a fo­rum on the dead­ly im­pli­ca­tions of coun­ter­feit phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal drugs, said the min­istry was work­ing on a pol­i­cy in which a num­ber sys­tem would be used by im­porters of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals.

The fo­rum was held at the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce, West­moor­ings, yes­ter­day.A spe­cif­ic num­ber, Khan added, would be trans­ferred to in­voic­es so as to track the move­ment of drugs in­to the coun­try to de­ter­mine whether they were coun­ter­feit or not.Singh, who al­so spoke at the fo­rum, said the method was faulty."That's a plas­ter. You put a num­ber on a prod­uct but who is pre­vent­ing the coun­ter­feit­er from putting the same num­ber on the prod­uct?" Singh asked.

He said the is­sue was a much larg­er pic­ture which was an un­reg­u­lat­ed phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­dus­try in T&T.Say­ing every­one was get­ting in­volved in the health care busi­ness be­cause it was thriv­ing, Singh said there were stores sell­ing cos­met­ic sup­plies which were al­so bring­ing in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal drugs."The on­ly stake­hold­er in the med­ical in­dus­try who is not reg­u­lat­ed is the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­dus­try. They are al­lowed to con­duct them­selves with­out any of­fi­cial reg­u­la­tion," Singh added.

He said sev­er­al years ago a pro­pos­al was made for dis­trib­u­tors to be placed un­der the um­brel­la of the coun­cil for pro­fes­sion­als re­lat­ed to med­i­cine so dis­trib­u­tors could be prop­er­ly li­censed.