Spurious drugs from Uttarakhand and UP found in Telangana

The fake drugs detected during DGA raids include medicines which are falsely labeled under the names of reputed companies like Sun Pharma and Glenmark Pharma.

Hyderabad: Fake and spurious drugs from Kashipur in Uttarakhand and Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh are flooding Telangana.

In the last two months spurious and counterfeit drugs detected and seized by Telangana’s Drugs Control Administration (DCA) during raids carried out include fake medicines which are falsely labeled under the names of reputed companies like Sun Pharma, Glenmark Pharma, Aristo Pharmaceuticals and also Torrent Pharma.

Spurious drugs may contain no active ingredient from ‘Nil’ medicine and found to commonly contain chalk, corn starch or potato starch etc or the wrong active ingredient.

For example Amoxicillin capsules may contain paracetamol instead of Amoxicillin or the wrong amount of the correct active ingredient. For instance Amoxycillin capsules 500 mg may contain only 50 mg of Amoxicillin.

“Some spurious drugs have been toxic in nature with either fatal levels of the wrong active ingredient or other toxic chemicals.

“Our teams also found three varieties of antibiotics MPOD Tablets and MEXCLAV  Tablets (Amoxicillin and Potassium Clavulanate, Lactic Acid Bacillus Tablets) and ‘Cefoxim-CV Tablets (Cefpodoxime Proxetil & Potassium Clavulanate, Lactic Acid Bacillus Tablets) during the raids which are labeled as manufactured by ‘Meg Lifesciences, Palli Gaon, Sirmour, Himachal Pradesh’ which is found to be a fictitious/non-existent company. Some spurious drugs are almost visually identical to the original, genuine product and very difficult to detect. Many times a laboratory test is the only way to identify the difference,” said DCA director general, VB Kamalhasan Reddy.

He added that spurious drugs place the patient’s health at grave risk. Spurious drugs not only fail to cure the disease but over time, create disastrous consequences for the patient.  

“Spurious drugs are by their very nature difficult to detect. They are often designed to appear identical to the genuine product,” cautioned DCA DG.