In order to enhance the capacity of sampling and testing of medicines in the state, three drug testing laboratories will be established in Rajasthan at Udaipur, Jodhpur and Bikaner by December this year. An amount of Rs.18 crore has been allocated by the state government for this purpose and another Rs.10 crore have been proposed in the current budget. Currently, there is only one drug testing laboratory in the state which is located at Jaipur and the state suffers a backlog of testing 2900 samples till date.

At present, the drug testing lab at Jaipur gets around 300 samples every month and testing of samples takes one month to three months time. Says an official from the Rajasthan Drug Control Department, "Around 60, 000 brands of drugs are available in the market and drug samples are collected based on the random survey. With the coming up of three state drug testing labs in Rajasthan, enhancement in the capacities will reduce the downtime significantly."

The need for an effective drug testing mechanism comes at a time when the Jaipur Lab's biologic testing infrastructure is being revamped. The state government has recently sent the sample for sterility testing and quality control of injectables to the apex testing lab Central Drug Laboratory (CDL), Kolkata on an urgent basis in the wake of the fact that around 155 Pepenum injections meant for animal use were allegedly administered to 28 patients at Jaipur based Government MDM Hospital.

Meant for treating high bacterial infection, the hospital on June 14 received from the market 1,000 such vials of Pepenum containing the drug, Meropenem, manufactured by Pushkar Pharma. Meropenem is available in dosages of 500 mg and 1 gm and the quantity mentioned on the vials was 1 gm. On the label of injections, it was clearly marked "Not for Human Use & For Animal Treatment only".

Two days later the vials were sent to drug distribution centres (DDCs) across the state healthcare institutions under the Rajasthan government's Free Drug Distribution Scheme. According to an official associated with the development, "A committee has been set up to inquire into the aspects that why the drug was wrongly labelled 'For Animal Use' and how the drug made way into the hospital considering the fact that it is a schedule H1 drug."

Rajasthan has a total of 17,298 healthcare institutions including primary health centres (PHCs), community health centres (CHCs), sub centres and government hospitals.