The State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), China's drug watchdog, announced Tuesday that starting on July 1, 2004, nobody may buy antibiotics in non-official OTC catalog without a doctor's prescription.

Shao Mingli, deputy director of the SFDA, told a meeting in Beijing on the rational use of antibiotics that China will tighten control and monitoring of the use of antibiotics nationwide, stamp out the production of antibiotics that are beneath local standards and have serious side-effects, and ban the advertising of antibiotics in the public media.

China used to have lax control over antibiotics. A SFDA survey showed that reports of side-effects from using antibiotics accounted for nearly 50 percent of the total side-effect reports, leading other kinds of drugs both in number of cases and degrees of severeness.

Shao said that many of the 20 million people with hearing disabilities in China are suffering because of the irrational use of antibiotics.

In the 1960s and 1970s, nationwide abuse of acheomycin resulted in damage to the teeth of a generation of Chinese people.

Shao said that abuse of antibiotics has led to increasingly drug-resistant bacteria, and some antibiotics have lost their effect altogether.

(Xinhua News Agency December 24, 2003)