As the days pass and 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. There are now at least 114 dead and about 400 who are in various stages of illness from ‘recovering’ to ‘terminal’. Quite apart from the original event that has seen the largest mass-poisoning in the history of the country, 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.
Almost inevitably the Supreme Court has now stepped in, and on Monday took suo motu notice of the deaths of more than 90 patients who were being treated by the Punjab Institute of Cardiology (PIC). It has issued notices to the attorney general, the Punjab advocate general, the federal and provincial secretaries, the DG FIA and the IG Punjab – all of whom are to appear before the bench and file a reply by Feb 5. 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. Where was their own quality control and why were these drugs ever allowed out of the manufacturer’s own front gate? The plethora of legal cases, commissions and enquiries may or may not provide us with answers, but as a matter of the utmost urgency the Punjab provincial government and the federal government need to resolve their differences about who ‘owns’ the drug regulatory bodies. Lives are being lost; politics should be put aside for their sake.
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