Events & Issues

New Delhi, 24 February 2010

Health In Danger

QUACKS & FAKE DRUGS ON RISE

By Suraj Saraf

“Path-breaking initiatives” for providing “quality and affordable” healthcare and innovative approaches to deliver medical care to remote and rural areas by the Union Health Ministry in recent times appears to be under grave attack by widespread quackery and flourishing fake drugs.

Quackery has made its way even into the most reputable hospitals of the Union capital, Delhi, not to speak of its prevalence elsewhere across the country. This apart, spurious drugs are not only seriously endangering public health, but robbing the people of huge sums of money. According to an estimate the fake drugs amount to 20 per cent of the total pharma production of Rs.83000 crores annually, adding enormously to the health woes of the people already under growing privatization of health care expenditure all around.  

According to the latest reports available there are around two lakhs quacks in the country of which 50,000 have been found in Delhi alone. And all this is only a tip of the iceberg reveals Dr. Girish Tyagi, Registrar of the Delhi Medical Council. Over the past one year, the Medical Council of India (MCI) had registered 41 FIRs in fake medical degree cases across the country. Worse, in Delhi there has been no conviction in such cases despite the Delhi Medical Council Act being in existence since 1997.

Faced with the situation, the MCI asserts that there is an urgency to pass the first comprehensive anti-quackery legislation it prepared way back in 2003. Sadly, the draft has since been gathering dust in the Health Ministry’s headquarter, Nirman Bhawan.

Besides, this past one year alone, health authorities had detected 20 fake doctors operating in some of the most reputed hospitals in and around the Union capital. “We found the trend prevalent and immediately tipped off the Director General Health Services, Delhi to instruct the hospitals in the region to get their doctors verified. The verification drive yielded shocking results. We registered FIRs in all these cases for fake medical certificates registration. Most of these fake doctors are now out of the hospital system,” Dr Tyagi added. However, he conceded that this might be the tip of the iceberg, considering that two lakh fake doctors (quacks) are in operation in the Indian medical system.

MCI authorities admit that rates of conviction under the existing anti-quackery provisions are negligible. Likewise, according to the Indian Medical Association, the largest organization of non-government doctors in India, “more than 50,000 quacks work in Delhi playing with the lives of innocent, poor and common people. Very little action is being taken against these quacks by the health authorities, which is helping them get away with this illegal practice,” says Dr. Anil Bansal, Convener of the Anti-quackery Cell of the IMA.

The IMA has requested the government “to take strict action against those violating the law and also asked for strong anti-quackery law and action to be taken against institutions or persons selling fake degrees.” Doctors had also asked the government to persuade chemists not to sell medicines without a proper prescription by an authorized doctor and launch a public awareness programme against such quacks. In addition, the Association has written to the President Pratibha Patil apprising of the menace and urging her to intervene.  

Other than the misery being faced by local patients, Delhi also happened to be a popular medical centre for foreigners, who have of late started coming to India for treatment and what is being termed as “medical tourism”. Clearly, Delhi cannot afford to have so many quacks, warns an anguished IMA.

With the numbers growing, the DGHS has finally decided to act and in an encouraging step, the Capital’s chief district medical officers have been given 90 days notice by the Directorate to list and start taking strict action against quacks.

However, the DGHS must remember that it is not just quackery that is threatening the public health. Equally or even more dangerous is the wide prevalence of fake drugs in the country, estimated by the World Health Organisation to be 20 per cent of the total production valued at Rs.85000 crores. This not only constitutes a serious drain on public money, but also puts people’s health at great risk.

As we all are quite familiar, the government normally takes an easy way out of forming committees to look into the problems staring it in its face. Here too, in the past a number of commissions and committees of official and non-official experts had been set up to deal with this menace. Regrettably not only to no avail but that the extent of spurious drugs had further increased.  

In addition, the MCI has again written to the Union Health Ministry seeking legislation to regulate the pharmaceutical industry’s practice of giving freebies to doctors to influence their prescribing habits. While the MCI has no jurisdiction over the pharma industry, it has only the Health Ministry to look up to. “The MCI’s ban on doctors accepting gifts, travel facilities and hospitality of any kind from any pharmaceutical or allied health care industry will only apply to doctors. But the pharmaceutical industry is also a party to such transaction and hence the Government of India needs to bring legislation to restrain pharmaceutical companies from these types of activities,” says the MCI President, Dr Ketan Desai.

Recently, Union Health Minister, Ghulam Nabi Aazd, has taken a number of measures, including further increase in the quantum of punishment for the offenders. He appears to be hopeful that his scheme for handsomely awarding the whistleblowers in this regard is likely to pay dividends. However, the problem is not so simple as the Ministry thinks it is. Its results do not seem to be so encouraging from the situation so far.

Indeed, the fake drugs business has entrenched itself so deeply in the country that one might say that some time more must be given to assess the full import of the Ministry’s scheme. Undoubtedly, the scourge of quacks and fake drugs will have to be challenged with strong actions by all those involved and the net will have to be spread far and wide. ---INFA

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