PANJIM: Responding to the issue of Goa Medical College and Hospital, Bambolim finding it difficult to dispose of the biomedical waste collected from across the State at its incinerator facility, Health Minister Vishwajit Rane on Thursday informed that he will ask the private hospitals to take care of their own medical waste.
Admitting that the GMC presently is dealing with a high quantity of such waste from the private hospitals, Rane slammed the big private hospitals for not making the requisite provisions for disposing of their medical waste they generate.
More importantly, he said he will write a note to the GMC asking the State hospital to stop taking waste from the private hospitals till such time that their own systems don’t become ‘high end’.
Responding to another issue, the Health Minister reiterated that there have been no illegalities in purchase of the Ivermectin tablets. He added that the prices of Ivermectin tablets procured by the government were decided by National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), the regulatory agency that controls the prices of pharmaceutical drugs in India.
He asserted that the government has not used Ivermectin as a prophylactic drug.
He pointed out that medicine prices vary as per company and are approved and fixed by NPPA and that the varying prices of Ivermectin were all approved by the agency. He gave the example of how price of drugs varies, by citing the gross difference in rates of Remdesivir vials across companies over a period of time. He however refrained from giving a similar comparison for Ivermectin tablets.
