NDA Orders Immediate Withdrawal of Anesthetic Drug from the Market

The National Drug Authority -NDA has withdrawn an anesthetic drug from the market following complaints from health facilities that the drug is inefficient.

While addressing the media on Tuesday afternoon, Abiaz Rwamwiri the NDA spokesperson said that the generic drug bupivacaine sold under brand name, ‘Bupitroy Heavy’ was immediately withdrawn on Friday following an investigation that found the drug to lack components it had when it was initially registered.

Rwamwiri says the drug has now been deregistered and for it to be re-imported into the country, it will have to first undergo thorough verification.

The drug is manufactured by India-based Troikaa pharmaceuticals but in Uganda its registered distributor is Abacus and according to a dossier seen by URN, they had been asked to submit a detailed report with a list of the clients who had been supplied, those who have responded to recall and those that hadn’t, no later than Thursday.

Warning that continued use of this drug in surgery could lead to fatal outcomes; the authority urged the public and other health workers to report in case they had experienced any side effects when they used the drug.

However, while the recall has been categorized as ‘Class A’, the highest level of alert showing that exposure to the drug is life threatening, Rwamwizi says that by Tuesday they had not registered any case of an individual who died from using the drug.

Meanwhile, drug recalls are one of the means used by drug regulators all over the world to safeguard the population from exposure to dangers associated with drug use.

It’s unclear when the particular batch of the anesthetic drug started being supplied in Uganda.