Over 80 percent of the prescription medications that Americans now buy from pharmacies are generic rather than brand name. The majority of the ingredients in those pills come from abroad. India and China are the two countries that dominate the supply chain in the generic pharmaceutical marketplace.
Ranbaxy is India’s largest drug manufacturer. The Food and Drug Administration has been looking into potential violations of the rules at Ranbaxy’s Indian facilities. A number of the firm’s manufacturing plants had already been barred from exporting drugs to the U.S. because of fraud, forgery and a failure to follow good manufacturing processes.
Now the FDA is reviewing problems at a Ranbaxy plant in Punjab, which sends ingredients to the company’s U.S. manufacturing facility in New Jersey. If the FDA issues an import alert for the remaining Ranbaxy plants in India, it might have an impact on generic drug availability in the U.S.
