MP News: Tracing Coldrif Bottle Buyers An Uphill Task, Says Food and Drug Administration Department

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): It appears to be a challenging task for Food and Drug Administration Department (FDA), to trace cough syrups bottles from consumers (families) in Madhya Pradesh.

The department had seized Coldrif bottles easily from medical stores, stockists.

The FDA teams are doing this job at two levels, one at medical store level and other at consumers’ level. The second level includes families, which have purchased the drug on the basis of doctors’ prescriptions.

“It is an uphill task for us to track Coldrif cough syrup bottles purchased by the families. First of all, we have to find those families. Then only, it will be possible to recover the bottles from them. People are not handing over the bottles after so much controversy over kids’deaths. People want to keep bottles as evidence. We will have to take help of local police to track such families in remote areas. The process is being carried out through medical stores and other retail outlets,” MP drug controller Dinesh Kumar Shrivastav told Free Press.

The FDA teams with support of district administration had conducted raids across the state and had recovered Coldrif cough syrup bottles after a tragedy had struck in Chhindwara.

About 157 bottles have been sold as per FDA records. The FDA teams have to trace bottles of cough syrup, which has been banned in Madhya Pradesh. But tracing the consumers (families) is main challenge before FDA teams, according to department officials. There is no online system to check the inventory of medicines in the state at the retail level.