Background: This fact-finding study aimed to attain an overall idea and knowledge about medicine disposal practices in Dhaka Metropolitan households. Methods: This mixed study (both quantitative and qualitative) was orchestrated to inspect the household leftover medicine disposal pattern’s governing status. A cross-sectional survey was conducted following a structured questionnaire and key informant interview with a household person and in-depth interviews with the top pharmaceutical and government officials. Results: Findings disclose that, for most of the key informants, the terms “drug disposal” and “drug pollution” were unknown; more precisely, 67% and 74% of key informants even did not hear these two terms. Almost all (87%) households faced undesired incidents due to the insecure storage of medicines. People disposed of excess and expired medication in regular dustbins (47%), threw out of the window (19%), flushed within commode (4%), burnt in fire (2%), and reused (4%). A good percentage of people (21%) returned unexpired drugs to the pharmacy and bought other medicines on a need basis. A total of 72% wanted a medicine take-back program, and 100% agreed on mass education on this issue. Officials of pharmaceuticals conferred mixed opinion: top-ranked pharmaceuticals will adopt leftover medicine disposal practices; middle and low-ranked pharmaceutical companies are reluctant, merely denied mentioning the less important issue. Conclusions: The absence of mass awareness and standard laws and policies may explain these existing aberrant practices.
Introduction: Clopidogrel and aspirin are at the base of treatment in conditions like arterial thrombosis and after patients have undergone percutaneous coronary intervention. But frequently found CYP2C19*2 and CYP2C19*17 polymorphisms and some variants of the ITGB3 gene cause alteration in the therapeutic effectiveness of this drug. Methods: One thousand cardiovascular patients were recruited for each drug under study. Their blood was collected to analyze the genotype using PCR-RFLP and T-ARMS-PCR method for clopidogrel and aspirin respectively. The PCR products for clopidogrel were screened with agarose gel electrophoresis and then digested with SmaIfor CYP2C19*2 and Nsil-HF for CYP2C19*17. The digested products of clopidogrel and the ARMS-PCR product of aspirin were run on 2% AGE to analyze the polymorphisms. Results: In our outcome, the percentage of hetero and mutant homozygous people in CYP2C19*2 polymorphism (loss-of-function allele) was 64.1% and for CYP2C19*17 (gain-of-function allele) was 22.3%. For ITGB3 polymorphism, it was found that 84.1% of them belonged to the homozygous group while 15.6% was heterozygous and only 0.3% were mutant homozygous patients. Conclusion: Our study findings were quite compatible with the results of some other studies in other ethnic groups. This phenomenon suggested for modification of dose or application of alternative generics in patients who are under the risk of therapeutic failure or toxicity produced by these drugs.