Quality of ceftriaxone in Pakistan: reality and resonance

The quality of pharmaceuticals is a global concern, counterfeit/ poor quality/ substandard medicines can cause harms in various ways: In a number of developing countries including Pakistan there is reportedly a high incidence of the availability of substandard drugs. The majority of these reports do not contain quantitative data to support these claims, nor do they describe the methodology employed for the quality assessment. Quality of drugs available in Pakistan are being questioned and topic of discussion in local news paper, TV channels in general public including journalist and physicians due to disparity of price among same generics, lack of knowledge for such science and unknown reasons. Since, quality of drugs can neither be assessed by naked eye or by every one therefore, randomly selected, 96 samples of different strength of injection ceftriaxone sodium and its generic, a widely used third generation cephalosporin in Pakistan since 1982 and 1994 till date respectively included in the said study to know the reality. 15.62% of ceftriaxone injection was found to be out of specification, however, not a single sample was found fake (spurious) out of 96 tested samples. Nevertheless, quality is a wide ranging concept covering all matters that individually or collectively influence the excellence of a product hence price and other related issues are also analyzed in the study.