Public confidence in drug safety is faltering after a recent string of errors and blunders. Yesterday, Secretary for Food and Health York Chow did not hesitate to acknowledge this unpleasant fact.

At stake here is the image of Hong Kong as a regional hub for quality medical services, which the city has been painstakingly trying to build and uphold in an eager attempt to boost medical tourism.

A perception of Hong Kong as a first-class medical center has led to an increase in the number of "medical tourists" from the mainland.

It remains to be seen to what extent the recent problems have damaged this emerging industry.

What is already apparent is that this wave of drug errors is scaring patients in Hong Kong.

People, many of them medical practitioners and manufacturers, may think that the complexity of medicine these days makes it impossible to prevent all errors. Yet, the kind of errors Hong Kong has seen recently involved no state-of-the-art medical sciences or permutations of modern medical interventions. We're talking about patients receiving expired drugs, wrong drugs, contaminated drugs or mislabelled drugs.

These are human errors, the direct results of a lack of due diligence and lapses of supervision of manufacturing, labeling, procurement and dispensing of pharmaceutical products.

Drug companies were cited in the deaths of six patients in one case and for either fraudulently or negligently mislabeling drugs in two others. Some of the blunders may have even been criminal.

To get things right, a rigorous program of quality assurance and accreditation needs to be put in place, starting with pharmaceutical companies.

Such a program may not be able to prevent all errors, but drug makers will be forced to detect and tackle problems early, before their products reach pharmacies and patients.

The slew of initiatives York Chow announced yesterday to revamp the city's pharmaceutical regulatory system will, hopefully, restore public confidence in drug safety.

(HK Edition 03/24/2009 page1)