GOI bans the import of Chenodeoxycholic acid and Ursodeoxycholic acid

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on March 16, the year 2020 has banned the import of two important drugs in India beneath the power given by the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940. These two drugs are Chenodeoxycholic acid and Ursodeoxycholic acid. They are no more eligible for pharmaceutical product registration in India.

The reason behind the ban is that both drugs Chenodeoxycholic acid and Ursodeoxycholic acid which is extracted and then prepared from porcine sources are more likely to possess a certain risk to the health of living beings that includes both human beings and animals. Thus it was necessary for Government to expedient to prevent the drug import as per public interest.

These two banned drugs are extracted from the biles of domestic pigs as well as the Asian black bears. China also possesses farms for bile extraction but these farms have got severe criticism from international global animal rights organizations because of the inhumane and unhygienic extraction process.

The process of acid extraction is one of the byproducts of the china multi-billion dollar pork meat industry. These extracts that consist of CDCA and UDCA are processed by the pharmaceutical industry and are then exported to the international market. But since August 2018, the pork industry of China is getting ravaged by the African swine fever that has killed millions of pigs. This virus is dangerous to domestic as well as the wild swine and the mortality rate is as high as 100 per cent.

Thus, keeping this in view the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, as per the gazette notification states that the use of these two drugs Chenideoxycholic acid and Ursodeoxycholic acid poses severe threat to the health of its citizens.

Hence the GSR 2 under section 10A of a recent notification, proposed banning the import of these two drugs