JEDDAH: The Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) recently launched a national center to monitor the safety of medicines that are being sold in the Kingdom.
“The new center will also take up within a month the mission of monitoring medicines by checking their registration, prices and validity,” said Dr. Ghazi Al-Saeed, director of the center.
The new move is expected to prevent unauthorized entry of medicines and medical compounds into the Kingdom. “We’ll monitor all aspects to ensure the safety of medicines, including their storage, marketing and wrong usage,” Al-Saeed said.
All powers related to medicine sales would be transferred to the center in coordination with the Ministry of Health. “We’ll set out a new mechanism to follow up medical compounds after marketing them,” he said.
Al-Saeed said the center would also check herbal medicines that are widely in use in various parts of the Kingdom, including their quality and side effects. “We’ll follow up in coordination with similar international centers new developments in medicines in order to ensure the availability of safe and quality medicines in the country,” he said.
“We’ll also receive complaints about side effects of medicines from experts as well as patients to revise their status,” he said, adding that medicines having serious side effects would be withdrawn from the market.
The SFDA has a website on the Internet to receive complaints about side effects of medicines. “This will help solve many problems related to medicines as the authorities can quickly respond to complaints,” Al-Saeed said.
He called for greater cooperation between citizens and authorities to contain negative trends in supply of medicines. He blamed the use of low quality raw materials and unscientific methods of preparation for contaminated medicines. “Writing wrong indications on packs and bottles of medicines will lead to wrong use,” Al-Saeed pointed out.
People sometimes store medicines without care for temperature and humidity. They also expose medicines to sunlight, he said.
