China to ban sale of non-prescription antibiotics

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, December 24, 2003

China to ban sale of non-prescription antibiotics

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The State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), China's drug watchdog, announced Tuesday that starting on July 1, 2004, nobody may buy antibiotics not in the official OTC catalog without a doctor's prescription.

Shao Mingli, deputy director of the SFDA, told a meeting here on the rational use of antibiotics that China will tighten control and monitoring of the use of antibiotics nationwide, stamping out the production of antibiotics that are beneath local standards and have serious side-effects, and banning 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.

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