DCGI Recalls Fake Drugs

New Delhi: India’s drug regulator on Wednesday said manufacturers of around 45 medicines have been ordered to recall their products for not meeting quality norms, while action has been initiated to book the makers of five spurious drugs.In an interaction with reporters on the sidelines of CII Pharma and Life Sciences summit here, Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI), Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) Rajeev Singh Raghuvanshi clarified that the recent reports of ‘50 fake medicines’ being banned were ‘completely wrong’.

“They are not fake medicines.They were ‘not of standard quality’ medicines. There is a difference between the two. Only five of them were spurious in our terminology, which you can talk as fake,” he asserted. Every month, he said the CDSCO samples and tests about more than 2,000 samples from the market, and out of that, “some 40-50, of them fail in one or the other parameter, which could be very minor parameters, also not of any health risk and we put that on our portal.”