Drugs have become one of the most indispensable parts of everybody's life.
Without medicines, no body can survive and these medicines are made of hazardous drugs.
Now days, life has become very complex and the complexities can be reduced by the use of drugs.
We have become slave to the harmful drugs and so we ignore the disastrous effects caused by them.
But the truth is that these harmful agents have more negative effects then the positive ones.
Not all the medicines are made of these perilous drugs hence it is very important to classify the drugs as hazardous drugs and non-hazardous drugs.
There are some criteria that decides the harmful nature of drugs.
According to these criteria, the noxious agents having the characteristics such as genotoxicity, carcinogenicity and teratogenicity are known as harmful drugs.
The agents that can change the genetic material are known to possess genotoxicity.
Carcinogenicity is the potential to cause cancer in both animals and humans.
The ability to cause some defects on the fetal development is called teratogenicity.
The drugs having the ability to cause cell degeneration, fertility impairment, skin diseases and organ toxicity also comes under the list of perilous drugs.
The treatment for cancer known as chemotherapy includes the usage of toxic agents such as cytotoxic, antineoplastic, immunosuppressive and antiviral.
All these agents are highly lethal and can induce many short term as well as long term health defects to the professionals handling them.
Various guidelines have been published by different healthcare organizations to minimize the risks of exposures to these toxic agents.
Various safety systems are also designed by these healthcare units.
Proper implementation of these safety guidelines and equipments is mandatory in all the workplaces.