India drug monitoring programme struggles to grow fast enough

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI: Within days of being given a diphtheria jab during a school vaccination drive, 5-year-old Meraj Shabbir Khan’s leg became so swollen that he was hospitalised.

In a cramped Mumbai pediatric ward, third-year pharmacology student Nitin Shinde opens the boy’s file and notes the vaccine, his age and the doctor’s diagnosis of a skin infection. That information is later logged into a computer programme linked to a national database, part of India’s fledgling efforts to track, analyse and ultimately warn patients about unknown side effects of drugs on the market.

India’s six-year-old pharmacovigilance programme, which col lects and submits suspected adverse drug reactions to a World Health Organisation ( WHO) database, is key to improvingdrugsafetyinacountry where medicine consumption is high, experts say.

But insuf f icient staf f and equipment,andalackofawareness SYDNEY: A miner trapped for a week underground in Indonesia after a tunnel collapsed has been rescued and is recovering in hospital, Australia’s Newcrest Mining said yesterday.

Pak Mursalim Sahman had been stuck 300 metres (1,000 feet) below the surface since the incident at Gosowong Gold Mine on Halmahera Island, operated by a Newcrest subsidiary, on February 9.

All other workers were safely evacuated at the time.

A small bore hole was drilled down to where the worker was among medical professionals mean many potentially dangerous drug reactions go unrecorded, hospital personnel across India told Reuters.

Gaps in the system mean the government has less data to determine whether drugs might have harmful side effects. Also, relatively little information f lows from one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical markets to the WHO database of over 12 million suspected adverse drug reactions.

“In a country of 1 billion people consuming so much medicine, obviously safety is a concern,” said G. Parthasarathi, dean of the pharmacy school at JSS University in Mysore, adding the pharmacovigilance programme is still gaining traction. “We’ve made a good start,” he said.

Last year, India contributed 2 per cent of the 2.1 million suspected reactions added to VigiBase, the WHO’s global database. China, with a comparable population, contributed 8 per cent. — Reuters

Indonesian miner trapped for a week rescued

trapped a day later and the man confirmed he was in good health and had supplies of food and water.

Another small drill hole allowed water, food and a communication link to be sent down so he could speak with the rescue team and his family.

Newcrest chief execut ive Sandeep Biswas said the company, one of the world’s largest gold miners, sought help from other miners and advisors who had led similar underground rescue efforts and he was finally pulled free yesterday. — AFP