Pharmaceutical companies in the GCC have been given one year to change the packaging of medicine (syrups) bottles and make them
‘child friendly’.

The Gulf Central Committee for Drug Registration has asked all pharmaceutical companies to ensure that packaging of medicine bottles containing liquids follows international standards and the packaging is
secure enough.

“We have asked them to make bottle covers secure enough so that children are unable to open them on their own,” said Nasser Khalifa Al Budoor, Director of the Department of External Relations and International Health at the UAE Ministry of Health.

The committee, that is part of the Council of Ministers of Health in the GCC, took the decision during its third meeting held in Dubai recently.

Al Budoor said that the step was being taken as part of the ongoing standardisation of drug procedures and regulations for the GCC. “Companies have to improve the quality of their products to meet these standards,” he said.

Most international drug manufacturing companies make two kinds of packaging — child resistant for households with children, and easy-to-open designed for adults.

They generally also advise that medicines should be kept out of the reach of children to avoid poisoning. In the US each year, unintentional poisonings from medicines and household chemicals kill about 30 children.

In the UAE, though no exact figures are available, the Poison and Drug Information Centre in Abu Dhabi reports that hundreds of people, many of them children, are accidentally poisoned every year due to various reasons including improper labeling of medicines.

Meanwhile, among the several topics discussed during the meeting was the recently established drug warning system in the GCC that would help in monitoring adverse drug reactions.

“This system will also provide a common drug information database easily accessible to workers in the health sector,” he added.

Al Budoor said that the unified registration system of medicines that is under consideration in the GCC would help reduce costs of drug registration especially when it is expensive. Once in place, the system will also attract the global pharmaceutical industry thereby helping the national industry, he said.

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