HANOI: After over nine month hiatus, Drug Admintration allowed two pharmaceutical companies to import Salbutamol for making medication in treatment people. Deputy Head of the Vietnam Drug Administration Do Van Dong August 26 said that the administration has given the green light to the two pharmaceutical companies including Vacopharm and Pharbaco to import the substance for producing drugs. Each company can just import 50 kilogram of Salbutamol material in 2016.
After the administration issued the decision for importing of the substance, it also sent a document to the Department of Animal Health and the Bureau of Animal Health both under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development asking to increase supervision and handling animal feed businesses and producers of veterinary medicine to prevent them from using the substance.
Addtionally, the administration proposed the Ministry of Public Security’s environmental police unit, known as C49, to coordinate with relevant agencies in order to ensure that the substance will not be used for wrong purpose. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development also sent dispatch to the Ministry of Health asking to publicly spread information of importers of Salbutamol to facilitate the control. Salbutamol is a medication that opens up the medium and large airways in the lungs, therefore used to treat such diseases as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The substance, however, can also be used as a lean-meat agent that helps pigs or shrimp gain weight in a short time but is detrimental to human health.
