Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Supreme Court Chief Justice (CJ) Saqib Nisar on Tuesday warned against the use of illegal and substandard stents, saying that use of these items would not be tolerated.

The CJ expressed this during the three-member bench proceedings into the suo moto notice on substandard stents.

He said that stents imported from China were instantly registered, with a similar process for American stents still pending.

“The government departments should clean up their acts, because their irresponsible behaviour would not be tolerated,” he said.

During the hearing, Justice Bandial questioned why these requests for registration of stents were pending.

Additional Attorney General Rana Waqar assured them that the concerned boards would take notice of the issue of registration of substandard stents.

The court ordered the drug regulatory board to submit their response to the issue at hand, adjourning the case till the first week of March.

Illegal stents have been used consistently in operations within the country though the issue has only recently been highlighted.

The stents are considered substandard as they are not registered and hence cannot be checked for quality.

Crackdowns from authorities showed that the use of such stents was prevalent in various hospitals across the country.

25 substandard stents were seized from private and government hospitals during raids by drug control teams in Peshawar.

According to health department officials, the seized stents did not have manufacturing dates, prices or registration numbers on them.

Further, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) also discovered the presence of a mafia, which was involved in fooling patients into purchasing fake stents.

According to FIA Deputy Director Sarfraz Chaudhry, an operation, in which the assistant director of the FIA acted as a patient, resulted in the discovery of fake stents worth Rs 40 million.

Those involved in these acts also included doctors at Lahore’s Mayo Hospital, who falsely diagnosed people with heart issues, opening the way for their accomplices to convince the victims into getting surgeries.

The victims would pay any amount up to even Rs 200,000 for the bogus stents which actually cost just Rs 6,000, with some patients even having surgeries done in which not even the counterfeit stents were placed into their bodies.

FIA officials also confirmed that the extent of the stent mafia reached up to the higher levels of authority, with a member of the Punjab government’s inquiry committee into the issue himself associated with the manufacturing of unregistered stents.