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Times of India
04 January 2009
New Delhi, India

Nine Drugs
Nine drugs, including commonly used painkillers, antibiotics and cholesterol–controlling medicines, will come under the watchful eyes of the health ministry as part of its national vigilance programmes launched on Wednesday.

The programme is aimed at monitoring the drugs which have side–effects and will enable a database to recommend withdrawals of such medicines and amendments in them if needed.

The drugs include rosuvastatin used as lipid lowering cholesterol–control agent, cox–2 inhibitors used as painkillers, phenylpropylamine for nasal decongestant, analgen and phenylbutazone used as painkillers, thioridazine an antipsychotic drug, nimesulide, another pain killer drug, furazolidone antidysentery drug and gatifloxacin, an antibiotic drug.

As part of the programme, side–effects of a drug will be entered in a database called to help in deciding the future course of action on a medicine. “Under this programme any effect on a patient—like death, life–threatening, hospitalisation, disability, congenital anomaly—all reactions suspected to have been caused by new drugs will be keyed into the database. It will be used to determine what action to be taken to improve safe use,” Surinder Singh, drugs controller general, said.

Y K Gupta, head of pharmacology, AIIMS, added that these reports shall also be submitted to the WHO International Drug Monitoring Programme for collaboration on drug safety. AGENCIES

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