Prices of 70 drugs to go up

ISLAMABAD - Prices of as many as 70 costly drugs are most likely go up significantly as the government has, in principle, accepted the demand in this regard by the pharmaceutical industry.
According to informed sources, the Ministry of Health has prepared the case for approval of the Minister-in-charge Sherry Rehman. The raise does not apply to all drugs but only to those special cases that have started having extremely high input costs.
It is now only a matter of a day or two as the application is lying on the table of the Minister and is only awaiting her signature. A proposal list of around 300 medicines has been submitted to the health minister for the price increase. According to the sources, in the first phase the Ministry has indicated that it would approve 60 to 70 products and later the prices of the remaining medicines will also be increased. The products that would be finalised by the ministry will get a 20 to 30 percent price hike.
Many factors, including a manifold increase in raw inputs, packaging material, increase in the consumption of fuel for generating power due to heavy load-shedding and increase in the transportation charges have compelled the industry to demand for an increase in specific pharmaceutical products which were in danger of closing down.
“In recent past, manufacturing cost of pharmaceutical products has also mounted and even some of the products are being marketed in loss and some of them are on the verge of closing down” an informed trader associated with pharmaceutical industry told, adding that the increase was meant to save a number of medicines that were about to close down due to the increasing production cost.
The sources maintained that since 2001, the pharmaceutical industry had not got the price increase and efforts were being made by the industry since a long time in this regard. The drugs that are most likely to be finalised by the ministry for price increase include Pulmonol (syrup), Phenobarbitone (Salt) frequently prescribed for epilepsy patients, Dextrose (water Infusion), Surbex (multivitamin tablet, syrup), dextrosline, Ibuprofen (painkiller tablet and syrup) and Metronidazole antibiotic.