Written By: Nirmalya Dutta | Updated : April 25, 2013 8:41 AM IST
On Tuesday, the J&K government started talking tough to check fake drugs promising to upgrade drug testing laboratories in Srinagar and Jammu to facilitate the speedy testing of drugs. Nobody will be allowed to supply spurious drugs in Jammu and Kashmir. It has been decided to upgrade drug testing laboratories in Srinagar and Jammu to facilitate speedy testing of drugs, said minister of state for health Shabir Ahmad Khan in a high-level meeting here.
He also instructed the authorities not to spare anybody involved in supplying spurious drugs and promised to take action against the accused. The decision to upgrade drug-testing laboratories in the current fiscal was also made and will be part of the official state plan and until the upgrade is complete, existing drug labs will work double-time.
The current fake drugs scam has been simmering in the valley for the last 10 days with reports showing that even after a drug called Curecef-1000 (Ceftriaxone) was found to sub-standard on three different occasions it was still being supplied to hospitals in the Valley including the GB Pant Paediatric hospital. Hurriyat Conference Chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq claimed that these fake drugs had claimed 700 lives and the government would have to answer for that. On Saturday, he had called for a general strike to protest the fake drug scandal.
