Jenkins Kiwanuka
21 April 2008
opinion
Kampala — The Economist (London) of February 23 indirectly touched on a subject that has long troubled me: the efficacy of drugs manufactured in India. In an article about India's fake doctors titled 'Quackdown', The Economist revealed that India has more fake doctors than genuine ones.
In Delhi alone, the Indian capital with a population of 14m., there are 40,000 quack 'doctors', while in India as a whole there are only 60 doctors for every 100,000 people compared with 257 for the same number of people in America.
Like the few 'quack' medics who have been nabbed at Mulago Hospital in recent years, India's quack 'doctors' don gowns, carry stethoscopes and equip themselves with thermometers and big piles of pills, mainly antibiotics, which they hand out to unsuspecting clients after checking their body temperatures and blood pressure.
The Economist further revealed that although organ trading has been illegal in India since 1994, in January this year the Indian authorities discovered an unqualified 'doctor' who had for a decade made a fortune by selling to rich clients, kidneys extracted from the poor slum dwellers in Delhi and other parts of India.
It is said that behind every other house or plywood shack in India, someone manufactures some kind of drug, especially antibiotics.
I have been checking on anti- hypertension drugs that are available on the Uganda market, and I have discovered that a 10mg tablet of Amlodipine from Britain, for example, costsShs3,000, while the same tablet from a leading laboratory like Dr Reddy's in India costs Shs500. Those from inferior manufacturers are even much cheaper. The question is: are those tablets of equal efficacy?
One explanation I got from a doctor is that in India labour is cheap, and that drug manufacturing is not highly taxed in India. Yet quacks are reported to mix their own remedies and buy other cheap, out-of-date drugs to do so.
How, especially now that Uganda is reported to be among the leading countries of transit for drug dealers, do we ensure that those concoctions do not end up on the Uganda market? Worse still, it is reported that the quack doctors of India have become so essential to India's healthcare system that even the country's National Aids Control Organisation is planning to include them in its Aids control programme as service providers.
Let us hope that Uganda's immigration department and the Ministry of Health keep track of such developments. Incidentally, medical clinics and hospitals in Uganda have already been invaded by brief-case-carrying salesmen of Asian origin who persuade our medics to buy drugs imported from India as opposed to those from elsewhere. One wonders whether these too are not 'quack' salesmen dealing in 'quack' drugs.
There is even Indian-made Viagra and other products that have lately infiltrated the Ugandan market. Someone offered that it is possible for some tablet from the same batch to be less effective than the others, depending on the manufacturer. But what he did not say is why that is so.
Are the responsible departments seriously looking into these problems? How, with the rampant corruption that permeates all levels of our society today, can we be sure that the drugs we are taking are safe, effective and short on side-effects?
Someone in the government should have an answer to these questions and probably tell the country what is happening or what plan is in stock to protect the citizens from such quacks.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 The Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
