ISLAMABAD/ LAHORE: The health ministry has notified new prices of paracetamol, a general medicine for reducing pain and fever that faded from the request after manufacturers said they could n’t make paracetamol- grounded tablets and bathos amid rising product costs.
The announcement, issued on Thursday, came nearly a week after the finance ministry gave the go-ahead to pharmaceutical companies to increase paracetamol prices by over 25 per cent.
Before that, on Oct 21, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare Pakistan Ltd suspended the manufacturing of its flagship product Panadol, which uses paracetamol as raw material, saying it had come unsustainable to produce the untoward drug on negative perimeters.
On Thursday, the Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association(PPMA) ate the increase in paracetamol prices but demanded the government also increase the prices of other drugs whose manufacturing has come unviable in the face of rising product.
According to the announcement, seen by Dawn, the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan(Drap), with the government’s blessing, has fixed the maximum retail prices of paracetamol and allowed its trade at new rates.
It said a packet of 200 paracetamol tablets( 500 milligrams) would be vended for Rs470, rephrasing into Rs2.35 per tablet. either, a packet of 100 tablets of paracetamol plus caffeine( 500mg/ 65 mg) will be vended for Rs275, or Rs2.75 per tablet. Paracetamol’s suspense(160mg/ 5 ml) having a 120 ml bottle will be vended for Rs117.60.
PPMA Chairman Syed Farooq Bukhari ate the price modification and hoped it would insure paracetamol’s continued force and end its deals on the black request at extravagant prices.
‘Commanding enterprises leaving Pakistan’
Meanwhile, the Overseas Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry(OICCI) has said that long detainments in fair compensation for cost hikes had led two leading transnational pharmaceutical companies — Sanofi and Bayer — to wind up their businesses from Pakistan, commodity the chamber said would negatively affect the foreign direct investment(FDI) coming into the country.
In a recent letter to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the OICCI said its members in the once 10 times had invested over $21 billion in Pakistan from their own coffers to promote the country as a destination for FDI, considering it was getting lower than one- third of its eventuality.
The foreign investors in Pakistan who are members of the OICCI set up it delicate to easily run their operations due to “prevailing query in the business terrain and lack of timely decision making by colorful government authorities”, OICCI President Ghias Khan explained in the letter.
“Medicinals and oil painting marketing companies, in particular, have genuine enterprises which need to be addressed on precedence so as to boost the confidence of leading, being and implicit, foreign investors in Pakistan,” he said.
The OICCI said that denying “licit price increase” to global exploration- grounded pharmaceutical companies represented in Pakistan — similar as GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott, Novartis and Pfizer was one of the most critical issues for foreign investors.
These companies, according to the chamber, also wrote to the health ministry and Drap to seek a one- time, across- the- board increase in medicine prices to alleviate the severe impact of the rupee’s devaluation and rising affectation on the assiduity.
“Given that drug prices in Pakistan are the smallest in the region, the long detainments in fairly compensating for cost increases have led some of the foreign mates, like Sanofi of France and Bayer of Germany, to advertise their exit from Pakistan and others may also be considering a analogous course of action,” the letter reads.
