The adverse drug reaction committee (ADR Committee) constituted by the Tamil Nadu Pharmacy Council has not started functioning and no drug reaction report was made even after three years of formation.

The committee was formed following inspiration from World Health Organisation’s (WHO) inclusion of India into the international adverse drug reaction monitoring committee formed by it involving advanced countries. WHO is funding the national ADR committees formed by each country and India is also a beneficiary of the same, said Dr Tirumalai Elango, registrar of the Council.

According to sources from the Council, no report of adverse reaction of any medicine could be made or sent to the DCGI so far despite support from various national and international agencies. Though the state is in the forefront in the field of healthcare management, it has faced several crucial situations during the outbreak of swine flu and chikungunya. To contain the diseases several companies brought out various kinds of medicines and marketed to all the pharmacies, but not any of them fetched the desired result. Even during these crucial periods, the ADR Committee of the Pharmacy Council did not come up for action.

The Council had, in fact, launched the mission of monitoring adverse reactions following unearthing of sale of expired drugs by certain traders in 2010. 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 with a senior medical doctor as its chairman. But the committee is yet to function, it is learnt.

“The monitoring of adverse reactions of drugs is not a mandatory job of the Council. We have no separate staff or fund for it. It is a social work undertaken by us. As far as functioning of the committee is concerned, I have to say that we have not detected any report of ADR and not sent anything to the drugs controller general of India. Now we are linking it with IMA Tamil Nadu branch and the nominee of the medical council Dr P Balakrishnan is the chairman. Now everything is under his control, we have no connection with it,” said the registrar.

Deans of medical colleges, HoDs of departments of medicine, pharmacology, pharmaceutics, drugs control director and director of public health are other members of the Committee. The reports made by the committee have to be sent to the DCGI who will in turn collect information from the concerned manufacturing companies of the drugs reported and finally send to the testing lab of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) for testing.

Several states in India have formed the ADR Committee and started functioning in the last two years.