(MENAFN- Pajhwok Afghan News) KANDAHAR CITY (Pajhwok): Residents of southern Kandahar province say drug sellers keep the medicines in substandard warehouses, which affects their quality and harms people'shealth 
.
The residents claim these medicines are smuggled into country particularly fromPakistan and have poor quality and harm human health.
However, Kandahar public health officials say they have been trying to stop low quality, expired and fake medicines from being sold in the market and they recently seized and destroyed 75 tons of such drugs.
Khairullah, a resident of first police district of Kandahar city, the provincial capital, told Pajhwok Afghan News that 70 percent of the country's medicines were imported through Kandahar.
He said traders kept medicines they imported at substandard warehouses which affected the quality of the products.
'We all know that chemicals are used in the making of drugs and they should be kept under specific temperature, but there is no standard warehouse in Kandahar for medicines storage, they are kept in ordinary storages,' he said.
He said it was the Public Health Department's job to force drug sellers into building standard warehouses for drug storages. He added medicines doctors prescribed to patients had no effect or contrarily damaged the person's health.
Khairullah said he also faced a similar issue when medicines had no effect on his health.
Another resident of Kandahar city, Abdul Khaliq Kaliwal, also complained that besides the mentioned problems, importing drugs from low grade companies was another issue officials should care about. Low quality medicines have long been imported to Kandahar, he said.
Kaliwal said most of the medicines were smuggled into Kandahar from Pakistan, an issue officials had failed to stop.
In most cases patients went from one hospital to another and chanted doctors due to inefficiency of medicines that created even more health problems for them instead of curing them, he added.
He said one of the reasons people travel abroad for their medical treatment was low quality of medicines imported to the country. He asked officials to pay attention to the problem and standardize drug imports.
Currently, 170 registered companies in Kandahar import medicines from Pakistan and other countries.
Moallim Mir Ahmad, head of the Medicine Importing Companies Union, said he had taken assurances from companies' owners to import quality medicines.
He, however, said there was need for a fully-equipped laboratory in Kandahar to test imported medicine and examine their quality.
Local health officials said their efforts to curb the import and use of expired, low quality and fake medicines were underway and recently they torched 75 tons of such items.
Public Health Director Dr. Abdul Qayyum Pokhla told Pajhwok Afghan News they conducted a campaign this week and examined all medicine storages in Kandahar City where 75 tons of fake, low quality and expired items were found.
He said the recovered expired drugs were torched in front of security, municipality andNDS representatives.
He asked traders and businessmen to import medicines from companies which were registered with the Afghan government.
He also asked importers to build quality storages where medicines could be kept and maintained in line with the guideline of the health ministry policy.
Pokhla said efforts to investigate the quality and dates of medicines had been intensified and pledged the establishment of a laboratory where medicines and food items could be examined.
According to health experts, the presence of low quality medicines has been forcing many people to travel to foreign countries specially Pakistan and India for treatment.
Pakistan and India earn millions of afghanis in revenue from Afghan patients.
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