‘A two year old baby needs ‘A’ blood, immediately. Call XYZ to donate blood and save her life.’

Most of us are no stranger to such messages and have often responded by mass forwarding it to friends. A new service started by the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) hopes to make such frantic SOS messages, a thing from the past.

The FDA’s new move to go paperless and introduce all licensing, renewal and inspection reports through its newly developed website, has several ‘public friendly’ measures.

The most important amongst these are stocks of blood banks available online and details of spurious and recalled drugs in the market.

Mahesh Zagade, commissioner, FDA Maharashtra said, “The initial idea was to conduct all licensing work and renewal work online. However, since we are the licensing authority for blood banks, we decided to provide the stocks of all blood banks online too.”

“At the click of a button people will get details of whole blood, its components and even rare blood groups at nearby blood banks. This service will also help blood banks do better co-ordination between themselves,” he added.

He further revealed that staffers at most institutions, out of the 160 blood banks in the state, had been trained and a password has been provided to them so that they can update their stocks on a daily basis.

The new website would be details on substandard batches of drugs, lotions and syrups drawn from the market. Details such as name of drug, name of chemist shop/distributor from where sample was drawn, reason for being labeled as substandard, manufacturer’s name and batch number, date of drawing the sample etc would also be available online.

Authenticity of medicines by verifying their batch numbers, checking the registration of pharmacists can also be checked from the website.

However it would be a few weeks until the website becomes available for public use