The road to traceability for traditional Chinese medicinal materials is long and arduous

Food and drug safety is closely tied to everyone's daily life and is a major issue of public livelihood and public safety. In recent years, as the contradiction between the output of traditional Chinese medicinal materials and their supply and marketing has intensified, the prices of traditional Chinese medicines have fluctuated considerably, and cases of counterfeit and shoddy products in production and circulation have occurred from time to time.

For example, some unscrupulous merchants use Cordyceps hawkesii, which closely resembles Cordyceps sinensis in appearance and color, to pass off as Cordyceps sinensis, and add iron wire to increase the weight of the cordyceps; they use apple peel in place of peony slices; and the most convincing form of adulteration is the mixing of medicinal dregs, in which dregs left after extraction by pharmaceutical factories are mixed into normal medicinal materials to pass off inferior goods as good ones.

Raising the modernization level of the circulation of traditional Chinese medicinal materials, so as to ensure the circulation quality of traditional Chinese medicinal materials and safeguard the life, health and safety of the people, has become an urgent task.

Initial results in building a traceability system for the circulation of traditional Chinese medicinal materials

In response to the repeated prohibition yet continued occurrence of counterfeit and shoddy products in the circulation of traditional Chinese medicinal materials and the relatively low level of organization and modernization in that circulation, the Ministry of Commerce, with support from the central government budget, began in 2012 to use information technology to digitize the systems of requesting certificates and invoices and of purchase and sales ledgers, forming a traceability system for the circulation of traditional Chinese medicinal materials in which “the source is known, the destination is traceable, the quality is verifiable, and responsibility is accountable.”

In October 2012, the Notice of the General Office of the Ministry of Commerce on Carrying Out Pilot Work for Building a Traceability System for the Circulation of Traditional Chinese Medicinal Materials was issued, deciding to apply modern information technology and Internet of Things technology in Baoding city, Hebei province, Bozhou city, Anhui province, Chengdu city, Sichuan province, and Yulin city, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, and, through electronic tags attached to the packaging of traditional Chinese medicinal material products, to electronically register relevant information on links such as the place of origin and source of the medicinal materials, production and processing, market circulation and use in pharmacies, and to carry out pilot work for building a traceability system for the circulation of traditional Chinese medicinal materials.

At present, in these four cities, positive progress has been made in building the traceability system for the circulation of traditional Chinese medicinal materials, the institutional and standards system has been preliminarily established, and the central traceability management platform and unified software have been developed and completed. The four pilot cities plan to cover 8530 operators inside and outside traditional Chinese medicinal material markets, 35 planting bases, 195 traditional Chinese medicinal material trading enterprises, 338 traditional Chinese medicine decoction piece production and trading enterprises, 20 large hospitals and 233 pharmacies, and have now entered the stage of tackling key implementation.

In 2013, with support from the central government budget, the Ministry of Commerce selected 7 provinces, Gansu, Yunnan, Jilin, Hunan, Henan, Jiangxi and Guangdong, to continue carrying out this work, planning to achieve the goal of nationwide coverage by the end of 2016.

In order to make the traceability system play its due role, in October 2013, the Ministry of Commerce, the State Food and Drug Administration and 6 other departments issued the Notice on Further Strengthening the Management of Traditional Chinese Medicinal Materials, clearly proposing to build a traceability system for the circulation of traditional Chinese medicinal materials, encouraging and guiding producers of traditional Chinese medicine decoction pieces and Chinese patent medicines to gradually use traceable traditional Chinese medicinal materials as raw materials, and at the same time requiring all regions to give full play to their subjective initiative and gradually form a reverse pressure restraint mechanism for traceability. The issuance of the document provided policy support for gradually establishing a reverse pressure mechanism for the traceability of the circulation of traditional Chinese medicinal materials.