The Gujarat Food and Drug Control Administration (FDCA) will soon start a drug testing lab in the northern part of Gujarat at Patan towards strengthening lab infrastructure in the state.
Gujarat has been leading in the country in terms of collection and analysis of drug samples as part of its ongoing crackdown on spurious drugs through its post-marketing surveillance programme. FDCA officers collected 11,300 samples in 2014-15 and 9,713 samples in 2013-14.
“Number of drugs sampled and tested in Gujarat will further increase with the starting of a lab at Patan in the coming six months time,” says Gujarat FDCA Commissioner Dr H G Koshia. At present, Vadodara lab is testing the highest number of samples in the country.
Further, Gujarat FDCA through its ongoing random sampling surveys at retail and wholesale stores, hospitals and manufacturing sites consolidated on yearly basis across the state registered a collection of 13,540 samples last year which is the highest in the country.
This is followed by states like Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh.
The FDCA's Vadodara based drug testing lab had tested the maximum number of 6,025 drug samples as part of a pan India spurious drugs survey which concluded last year to assess for the first time complete testing of not-of- standard quality (NSQ) drugs as per Indian pharmacopoeia and other pharmacopoeias.
Done at an estimated cost of Rs. 8.5 crore, the Union health ministry had entrusted the job of National Drugs Survey in July 28, 2014 to Noida based National Institute of Biologicals (NIB) which compiled it in the form of around 400 pages of well documented evidence based study based on the pan-India sampled field data to the tune of 48,000 samples.