Kathmandu, August 17:

The condition of Biraj, a six-year-old boy who is ill, would have detiriorated further or perhaps he may not have seen another day had his father not taken a closer look at a bottle of medicine he bought from a drug store.

Binaya Ghimire bought medicines, including a bottle of vitamin B complex syrup, the doctor had prescribed for the boy last month. However at home, when Ghimire poured the syrup in a spoon he saw a fibre-like substance flowing out of the bottle. “I took a closer look at it and found that the bottle was filled with the substance,” Ghimire said.

He rushed to the drug store at Sinamangal and had the bottle replaced, only to find that the fresh bottle, too, was full of the same substance.

The syrup — ‘Vit B’ — is a product of Unique Pharmaceuticals. The bottle bears the Batch No L-5042 and the manufactured date of December 2005. The expiry date was May 2007.

The bottle was today taken to the Department of Drug Administration (DDA), where Navin P Shrestha, the chief of the drug inspection section, confirmed it was sub-standard. “We cannot say what harm the substance will cause without first conducting a test,” he said.

“We should not conclude that all products of the company are sub-standard just because a batch is sub-standard,” said Bhupendra Bahadur Thapa, director general, DDA. He said the department would recall all the product of that batch and inspect the manufacturing practices of the company.

Of the 38 domestic pharmaceutical companies, only five are manufacturing as per the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) set by the WHO.