The drug information centre (DIC) started by Tamil Nadu Pharmacy Council in collaboration with the state drugs control department in 2007 will be shut down shortly due to lack of responses/queries from the public, sources from the Council told Pharmabiz.

The Council is also planning to stop its programme of evaluation of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR) which was launched in certain districts in a small scale, a few years ago, said Dr T Elango, Registrar of the Council.

Sources from the drugs control department said there are increasing number of pharmacovigilance centres in almost all the government and private medical colleges and the adverse reactions of the drugs are timely monitored and reported in those centres. So there is poor responses from the public requesting services of the DIC which is located at the premises of the drugs control department.

The state government has provided the office facility and the pharmacy council appointed the staff for the DIC. At the time of commencement of the Centre, there were three pharmacists and two technical staff. At present only one pharmacy graduate is in charge of the office where no query is arrived from any source requesting drug information. The aim of the DIC was to provide unbiased drug information to healthcare professionals and public.

Regarding ADR monitoring, the Council had announced that at first its evaluation programme was focused on finding out the adverse reactions of antibiotics used by patients in the government hospitals. But, so far no significant effort was done or any meaningful documentation was made or reported to the drugs controller general of India (DCGI), sources close to the Council informed.

For the process of evaluation and data collection, the Council had constituted a separate seven member committee (ADR Committee) with a senior member of the Tamil Nadu Medical Council as chairman. Even that committee has not started functioning till now. Certain Council members have raised objections to the inactive activities of the Council and allegations are still going on.

The Council had, in fact, launched the mission of monitoring adverse reactions following unearthing of sale of expired drugs by certain traders some years ago. The expired drugs issue had caught the attention of the national regulatory body besides state government. To tackle such issues from repeating in future, the pharmacy council constituted the committee, but did not kick off.