Azernews.Az

By Amina Nazarli

Azerbaijan's Health Ministry has released a list of more than 340 banned drugs across the country.

Some medicines produced in Turkey, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Austria and Greece are among the banned drugs.

Most of these medicine are produced in Turkey. Validity of most of these drugs will expire in 2015-2018.

Meanwhile, most of them could not get meet Azerbaijan's laboratory standards.

Recently, Chairman of the State Customs Committee (SCC) Aydin Aliyev said Azerbaijan keeps severe control over import of medicine.

Law on Medicine Act is the main document in the pharmaceutical market in Azerbaijan, adopted in 2007. In 2009, some changes were made in this law.

A total of about 3,652 medicines are registered in the state registry. Drugs from the allowed list are imported only for use in the country.

All medicines are checked up before reaching pharmacies and hospitals.

Azerbaijan bans any import of drugs to the country without a license, permission or other relevant documents. However, it is impossible to prevent import of poor quality products by citizens.

"The customs bodies are authorized to withdraw narcotics psychotropic substances and their precursors from trade turnover. Unfortunately, some citizens buy drugs for personal use while being in other countries. So we cannot do anything in this regard," he noted.

It is necessary to appeal to the Health Ministry to include drugs to the list of allowed medicine.

In his/her appeal, the manufacturer should indicate the purposes of import of these drugs, trade name of the drug, the international non-proprietary name, pharmacotherapeutic group, the shape of the drug and the dose, the total number of packages, the name and address of the manufacturer, series number, period of use and storage conditions, the production license from the authorized body of the country of manufacture, quality certification.

After examination of the documents, the Health Ministry submits them to the pharmacological advisory council of the Ministry for final approval.

On the basis of the primary reviews, the Expert Council makes a decision about feasibility of preclinical studies and clinical trials.

Having successfully accomplished the procedures, the Health Ministry permits import of certain number of drugs without state registration in Azerbaijan to implement preclinical studies and clinical trials.