Drug firm linked to 6 deaths to face court over sale of tainted medicine

Drug maker Europharm will face court at the end of the month for selling drugs unfit for human use.

The case will be heard in Fanling Court on April 30. Europharm is the only pharmaceutical company to have received a summons after a series of recent medical blunders.

The firm was ordered to stop production on March 6 but the Health Department allowed it to resume production yesterday after its monitoring process was tightened to avoid a repeat of contamination.

Department staff will pay weekly visits to the firm over the next month, Director of Health Lam Ping-yan said. It also set a 48-hour limit for the storage of compounds before the materials are made into tablets.

'After the implementation of the 48-hour criterion, we will see if there is any contamination of Europharm products and consider suggesting to the review committee [on drug regulations] if the new measure should be applied to all drug manufacturers,' Dr Lam said.

The head of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong, Yuen Kwok-yung, said raw materials for drug production, intermediate products and finished tablets would be checked against acceptable bacterial and microbiological levels.

Since October, six patients are believed to have died of a rare fungal infection after taking Purinol, a brand of allopurinol produced by Europharm. Government tests found four batches of Purinol were contaminated by fungus at 10 times the permitted level. Following tests, public hospitals replaced the drug. Europharm stopped production after the contamination was revealed on March 6.