Islamabad, Feb 1 (IANS) The death of over 100 people who took contaminated heart medicines in Pakistan’s Punjab province is a failure of checks and balances and looks like “institutionalised incompetence”, said a daily.
An editorial in the News International that as more patients die dreadful deaths as a result of faulty drugs, “the layers of the onion are being peeled away revealing what looks like institutionalised incompetence at every level”.
The drug scandal took place in Lahore’s Punjab Institute of Cardiology.
Describing it as the “largest mass-poisoning in the history of the country”, the editorial said: “…it is now learned that there enormous stocks of imported medicines donated by the World Health Organisation and other international donors are sitting unregistered and unapproved by the Drug Testing Laboratory in, of all places, the Allama Iqbal Medical College and the Jinnah Hospital, Lahore.”
“Hospitals are something of a law unto themselves when it comes to drugs purchasing; but in the absence of a uniform regulatory system applicable to all drugs approvals and purchases it is not difficult to see how the current crisis has come about,” it added.
The editorial went on to say that there has been a cull of the senior management of health services in Punjab and there are going to be cases pending in connection with this wholly avoidable disaster for years to come.
“Hundreds of lives have been blighted, many of those affected, although recovered sufficiently to be discharged from hospital, may never be wholly well again. At the core of the disaster there is a failure of checks and balances, a failure that may well have been known to those that manufactured the faulty medicines.”
