KARACHI, Oct 25 (Focus Pakistan) — Two medicines failed government lab tests this month. One is Caraway Pharmaceuticals’ Carapamin, an injection that ICU doctors reach for when a patient’s blood pressure collapses. The other is Martin Dow’s Librax, a widely used stomach medicine. Now a nationwide DRAP medicine recall aims to pull both batches off the shelves.
The Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) sent out Recall Alert No. I/S/10-26-45. Its inspectors, working with provincial drug controllers, must now find batch 26A059 of Carapamin Injection 200mg and batch 001952 of Librax tablets and get them out of circulation.
The regulator put the risk at moderate to high. Its advice to patients and chemists is simple: stop using these batches, and stop selling them, today.
Caraway’s ICU drug fails Lahore test
Carapamin contains dopamine hydrochloride, a drug intensive-care teams rely on when a patient’s blood pressure crashes or circulation starts to fail. Caraway Pharmaceuticals produces it at its plant in Rawat, near Islamabad. When the Lahore Drug Testing Laboratory ran its checks, the batch came back with more organic impurities than the rules allow.
Martin Dow’s Librax flunks in Faisalabad
Librax is a Martin Dow Limited product, made at the company’s Korangi plant in Karachi. It mixes two drugs into one tablet: 5mg of chlordiazepoxide and 2.5mg of clidinium bromide. Most prescriptions are for stomach cramps or an irritable bowel. In Faisalabad, the drug testing lab checked batch 001952 and got impurity readings over the limit.
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There is another wrinkle. Chlordiazepoxide sits in the same drug family as Valium. Take it for months and the body can start to lean on it. That makes a sudden switch harder for regular users.
According to DRAP, impurities at these levels can make a medicine unstable and may lead to new, unwanted compounds forming inside it. DRAP identified cardiac patients, allergy sufferers, children and people taking long-term medication as particularly vulnerable.
Punjab raised the alarm a week earlier
Punjab’s Directorate of Drugs Control flagged the same batches in Alert No. 150/2026 on Oct. 16 and told its drug inspectors to sweep the provincial market. Seven days separated Punjab’s alert from DRAP’s nationwide directive. Neither notice explains how much affected stock remained outside Punjab during that interval.
So far, DRAP has given no numbers. Nobody outside the regulator knows how many packs went out, or how many Caraway and Martin Dow have pulled back. The notice gives no impurity readings either.
Lab failures and patient harm are two separate things, and the alert reports only the first. DRAP’s published alert identifies no confirmed injury or death associated with either affected batch.
Something in the federal alert doesn’t add up. Its first lines talk about sterility testing, the check doctors use to catch germs like bacteria or fungus. The product entries, however, list excessive organic impurities — a chemical defect, not a microbial one. DRAP has not clarified the wording, and the published lab findings support only an impurity failure.
Librax has run into the same issue abroad. U.S. Food and Drug Administration records list a Class III recall, D-1034-2016, of Librax capsules made in Canada for Valeant Pharmaceuticals, after two lots failed impurity and degradation specifications. The FDA treats Class III as low risk. That case involved a different manufacturer and has no connection to Martin Dow’s Pakistani product.
Back home, it’s hardly a one-off. Last year DRAP inspectors walked into the factory behind substandard AMLOshine blood-pressure tablets, a Sunshine Pharmaceuticals product. The company, they found, hadn’t been running impurities tests at all, and had never validated its lab methods.
What the DRAP medicine recall means for patients
Chemists and medical stores already have their orders. Check the shelves, stop selling the two batches, set any leftover packs aside and send them back to the supplier or the company.
For patients, the first step takes a minute: look at the batch number printed on the pack. If it matches, they should talk to a pharmacist or their doctor. They shouldn’t just quit the medicine on their own, though. That goes double for Librax, since dropping a benzodiazepine overnight brings problems of its own. Doctors and pharmacists who spot a bad reaction can report it to DRAP’s National Pharmacovigilance Centre.
The recall covers only these two batches, not every Carapamin injection or Librax tablet on the market. Still, the regulator faces a question it has so far left unanswered: how many doses from these two batches have already reached patients?
