During surprise inspections carried out in 2017 on 55 drug distributors in China, about one in three did not meet quality requirements, the China Food and Drug Administration said in a Feb. 7 release.
Of the total, 18 were found to be in severe violation of drug quality management practices.
Some of the violations include forging documents, not maintaining storage standards for drugs and not providing required information on products.
The regulator ordered provincial level authorities to revoke the certificates of the 18 companies and investigate individuals responsible for the violations.
China has been trying to implement stringent quality control over drug manufacturing and distribution, with nearly 80% of pharmaceutical producers inspected in 2016 failing to meet standards.
The government is expected to continue frequent inspections into the year to boost drug quality and squeeze out weaker players.
Concurrent with its ongoing monitoring efforts, the CFDA also published the country's first marketed drugs list in January.
The list contains 131 types of medicines in 203 categories and shows the generic drugs that are therapeutically equivalent to the brand medicine. Beijing has mandated that all generic drugs must pass a bioequivalency test by the end of 2018 to prove they are as good as the original and failure to do so could mean the drug is banned from the market.
As of Jan. 4, 13 drugs had passed the bioequivalency test, the CFDA said. In that list is Hong Kong-listed Sino Biopharmaceutical Ltd.'s hepatitis B drug Qingzhong, which it claims is the first generic to pass the new test showing it is at par with the original drug, Gilead Sciences Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline plc's Viread.
