: The District Tuberculosis Centre at the Civil Hospital here has run out of medicines stock and is struggling to procure the required amount from the local market to provide for the patients on course.
According to the district TB officer, Dr Ashish Chawla, they had started to feel the crunch in late March.
“The stock we had was supposed to last till April 30, but on March 31 we procured medicines worth ₹2.5 lakh. But now after the medicines in stock expired on April 30, we don’t have anything left in our stock,” he said.
The TB centre was asked to procure the medicines required at their own end. For this, Dr Chawla said, they needed around ₹20 lakh as there were around 4,000 patients on medication in the district.
They were only sanctioned ₹13 lakh. But the centre faces a bigger problem. There aren’t enough medicines available in the local market to meet the requirement.
“The wholesalers here don’t have the quantity we need. We are trying our best to procure as much as we can from whatever source is available,” said Dr Chawla.
The centre was on May expecting an order of 800 4-FDC and 1200 3-FDC strips.
These are fixed-dose combinations, in which either four salts/three salts are available in a single table or a single kit, to make it easier for the patient to stick to the necessary six-month course. If a patient went without the medicine for over a month in the six-month period, they were to get through the course from the beginning and even worse the bacteria may develop drug resistance, according to Dr Chawla.
There were two types of 4-FDCs. One of these is called Accurate 4, which came in strips of ten tablets each. A patient weighing above 70 kg needs six of these tablets every day. A strip doesn’t even last one and a half doses. The other is AKT-4, which comes in kits. A kit contains four tablets, and a strip has five kits. A strip of these lasts five days.
State TB officer Dr Rajesh Bhargav acknowledged the shortage of drugs across the state.
The drugs come to the state health department from the Union ministry of health and family welfare. But, for now, he said, the ministry had asked the states to look after the procurement of drugs on their ends.
The contract for the procurement of medicine had expired and any new tender could only be floated after the elections, said a health official explaining the shortage.
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