Abstract:
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.
