Supervision ensures medical products safe

With the sale of medical products online skyrocketing in recent years, the National Medical Products Administration has led a crackdown to ensure only safe and approved products are available for consumers.

By upping its supervision and scrutiny on the production and sales of drugs, cosmetics products and medical devices, the administration was able to resolve 153,600 cases involving the production of unauthorized medical devices or producing and selling fake drugs and cosmetics last year. Those suspected of violating laws have been transferred to public security organs for further investigation, senior officials at the administration said at a news conference in Beijing on Wednesday.

The administration also published and made available online 32 cases as warnings to industry operators and pharmaceutical companies.

It's estimated that the online sales of drugs and medical devices last year reached 292 billion yuan ($40.4 billion), and is expected to exceed 350 billion this year, said Huang Guo, deputy director of the administration.

"So we've taken a series of measures to regulate the online market aiming to further secure the quality of these drugs for online sales," Huang said.

He said the administration has built a specialized supervision system for the online sales of drugs, medical devices and cosmetics.

"We've included major companies and platforms selling these products in our monitoring network. We have also organized several campaigns to investigate if these companies or platforms have improper or illegal behaviors, with their products being removed from shelves and their accounts being shut down whenever illegal trades are confirmed," he added.

Last month, the administration launched an 18-month campaign aimed at improving the supervision of pharmaceutical companies and the market.

Xu Jinghe, another deputy director of the administration, said at the news conference that it will enhance the inspection and review of drugs before approving them for entry into the market, and will tighten on-site inspection of companies found to have had improper or illegal behaviors.

"We will also take stronger measures to crack down on illegal behaviors to let the law-breakers pay the price, and will continue to publish example cases," he said.

He added that the administration will continue to push forward the release or amendment of regulations and laws on drug supervision, and improve drug supervision at the community level and in rural areas.

According to the administration, the pass rate of the nation's drug testing has risen to 99.4 percent from 97.1 percent in recent years thanks to whole-process supervision.

So far, the nation has over 20,000 officials involved in drug inspection at the provincial level.