The Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM) established on
Monday a national working group tasked with identifying traditional
medicine containing banned substances.
BPOM chairwoman Lucky
S.Slamet said on Monday that the working group would tackle traditional
medicine containing illegal substances through routine market operations
and surveillance.
The group will also conduct an awareness campaign to warn the public about the dangers of such medicine, she added.
“We
will also impose tighter control on manufacturers previously known to
produce traditional medicines containing drug substances,” she said in a
statement made available to The Jakarta Post on Monday.
With
the working group, Lucky said, people would be better protected from
traditional medicine containing restricted substances.
“The business players will hopefully stop producing such products,” she added.
The
trade value of traditional medicine in Indonesia reached Rp 13 trillion
(US$13.3 million) in 2012, up from Rp 11 trillion the previous year.
Checks conducted by the BPOM revealed that various traditional medicine sold at local markets contain restricted substances.
BPOM
data show that 1.89 percent of the traditional medicine sold locally in
2012 contained restricted substances, up from 1.77 percent the previous
year.
Between 2008 and 2012, the BPOM destroyed 1.9 million
samples of traditional medicine containing restricted substances that
were confiscated in operations. (ebf) (
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