India Has Led The Way In Authenticating Medicines, But Must Do More

The recent deaths of 66 children in The Gambia have been linked to their consumption of four brands of imported Indian cough syrup, which the World Health Organization has said were contaminated and substandard. Are spurious and substandard drugs widely available in India? How worried should we as consumers be about the drugs we buy, and how do we check whether these are safe? We asked Dr Rajeev Jayadevan and Nakul Pasricha, CEO of Pharma Secure. India has been a leader in securing its pharmaceutical supply chains, after some spurious drugs in the Nigerian market labelled ‘made in India’ were found to have been made in China, but the tragic incident in Gambia shows that India needs to do much more to tighten regulation, they say.