FOR OUR ACTIVITIES VISIT ​CERC WEBSITE

"Over the years consumers have faced difficulties with labelling information on pharma strips. Medicine names and expiry are often illegible, and are printed on one edge. As the strip gets consumed, the consumer no longer has access to this information, especially, if the strip is to be used after an interval. In our country, a majority of economically weaker consumers who cannot ordinarily even buy adequate medicines, are really hard hit when they have to throw away medicines in situations such as this. If, through an error, they consume the wrong medicine, the price they might have to pay would be their health and well-being.

Besides financial loss and/or health hazard, when cumulated, in a country our size, it is a colossal National waste.    

Thus printing of essential information, i.e., Name of the medicine and Expiry date should be mentioned on both ends of the packaging so that it is readable even as the strip gets consumed throughout its shelf life. It will prevent wastage of medicines as also save hundreds of crores of consumers, besides National loss due to wastage.

It is imperative that we, consumers raise our concern against continuing such a waste.

As a Consumer Rights Organization, we have studied this issue in depth and have put forth detailed recommendations.

If you agree that action is required on this, we request you to sign this petition and request others to sign it too. 

Our detailed recommendations are given below:

1.      Labeling must ensure that the critical information necessary for the safe use of the medicine is legible, easily accessible and that users of medicines are assisted in assimilating this information so that confusion and error are minimized.

2.      In particular the information presented on small packs needs careful consideration so that the text is presented in as large a type size as possible to reduce the likelihood of medication error.

3.      For blister pack presentations it is important that the particulars remain available to the user up to the point at which the last dose is removed. Often it will not be possible to apply all the information over each blister pocket, consequently where a random display of the information is proposed it should frequently appear across the pack.

4.      In such cases it will be acceptable to apply the batch number and expiry date to the end of the blister strip. If technically possible, applying this information to both ends of each strip should be considered.

5.      Where a unit-dose blister presentation is proposed all the information required for blister packs must appear on each unit dose presentation.

6.      In addition, blister foils should be printed to ensure maximum legibility of the information using a sufficiently large font.