Monitoring Report
The health ministry has notified new prices of paracetamol, a generic drug for reducing pain and fever that disappeared from the market after manufacturers said they couldn’t make paracetamol-based tablets and syrups amid rising production costs.
The notification, issued on Thursday, came almost 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 become unsustainable to produce the over-the-counter medicine on negative margins.
On Thursday, the Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PPMA) welcomed the increase in paracetamol prices but demanded the government also increase the prices of other medicines whose manufacturing has become unviable in the face of rising production.
