Probe into bad pills under way
The Ministry of Health ordered an urgent investigation yesterday into whether public health has been put at risk due to a lack of checks being conducted on medicines distributed on the local market, said Deputy Health Minister Thanassis Yiannopoulos. The deputy minister was responding to a study released by the Athens Medical School and published in Sunday’s Kathimerini that said tens of thousands of boxes sold in Greece in the last 10 years contained poor-quality medicines that have on many occasions threatened patients’ health. Yiannopoulos told Kathimerini that the Health Ministry’s inspection team will determine whether checks being carried out on pharmaceutical companies are adequate or whether the market is operating without any form of regulation. «What interests the government is that the Institute of Pharmaceutical Research and Technology (IFET) monitors the primary material of medicines,» he said. «And for it to check whether the medicines contain the right contents,» he added.