Kottayam: Some of the public health workers in Ernakulam district were faced with an unenviable task recently. They had to hire a public address system and go to town to warn people that the medicines supplied from a government-run health center were actually something else.
The strange recall was the result of a confusion created by deceptively similar labels on different medicine bottles and strips. And the trend is creating havoc across the government hospitals and health centers in Kerala.
The drug manufacturers who have bagged contracts to supply medicines to the Kerala Medical Service Corporation Limited (KMSCL) print the labels for different medicines on the same template to cut costs. The government procurement agency’s warning to blacklist such companies and impose hefty fine on them has clearly failed to deter the offenders.
Companies, which win the tender proceedings by quoting the lowest bid, find smarter ways to make up for the dent in their profits. Printing similar labels is one such strategy. Entirely different medicines come packed in identical strips with similar writings, color codes and graphic patterns, confusing packing employees and pharmacists alike.
New batches of turpentine liniment and calamine lotion - meant to be applied externally - come in the same bottles as a cough syrup. Employees misplace them at the time of packing them off to different pharmacies. The confusion is prevalent in pharmacies and many a time, patients are given something entirely different than what the doctor has prescribed.
The drug makers also cut down on the size of the pills and their packs, shrinking the label in the process. Pharmacists and patients would be required to carry a magnifying glass if they were to differentiate between the glibenclamide pills prescribed for diabetic patients and the anti-inflammatory diclofenac because their labels are identical and the writing shrunk beyond recognition.