Santo Domingo.- The recent scandal with bogus, expired and smuggled medicine and pharmaceuticals isn’t news to the Dominican Pharmaceutical Association (Asocfar), whose president yesterday called the situation “asphyxiating” for the sector.

Asocfar president Karen Tamarix complained that the Government only takes action when it reaches the level of scandal, including the Public Health Ministry’s recent shuttering of dozens of businesses in the northeast city Moca, where hundreds of millions of pesos worth of bogus, smuggled, expired and not-for-sale doctors’ samples were seized in a still ongoing operation.

She said there 854 distributors and 104 non-clinical labs across the country that manufacture and market medicines, cosmetics and personal hygiene products, a figure she describes as “alarming” since for four decades, those businesses operate with a “total” lack of regulation/

“For the professional pharmacist it’s an asphyxiating situation, we’ve been denouncing the adulterated and smuggled medicines and pharmaceuticals and the total lack of regulation for four decades,” Tamarix said in an interview for DT in the Hotel Santo Domingo.

In recent joint operations Customs Agency and Public Health inspectors have seized all types of uncertified and expired medicine, after at least one death was attributed to an unregistered dose of tetanus.