The State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), China's drug
watchdog, announced Tuesday that starting on July 1, 2004, nobody
may buy antibiotics in non-official OTC catalog without a doctor's
prescription.
Shao Mingli, deputy director of the SFDA, told a meeting?in
Beijing?on the rational use of antibiotics that China will
tighten control and monitoring of the use of antibiotics
nationwide, stamp out the production of antibiotics that are
beneath local standards and have serious side-effects, and ban the
advertising of antibiotics in the public media.
China used to have lax control over antibiotics. A SFDA survey
showed that reports of side-effects from using antibiotics
accounted for nearly 50 percent of the total side-effect reports,
leading other kinds of drugs both in number of cases and degrees of
severeness.
Shao said that many of the 20 million people with hearing
disabilities in China are suffering because of the irrational use
of antibiotics.
In the 1960s and 1970s, nationwide abuse of acheomycin resulted
in damage to the teeth of a generation of Chinese people.
Shao said that abuse of antibiotics has led to increasingly
drug-resistant bacteria, and some antibiotics have lost their
effect altogether.
(Xinhua News Agency December 24, 2003)