The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has disclosed that 50 percent of imported pharmaceutical products that are imported to Nigeria are fake.
The disclosure was made by the Director General of NAFDAC, Mojisola Adeyeye, during a recent stakeholders’ engagement in Abuja.
Adeyeye explained that the certificate of a pharmaceutical product (CPP) is expected to follow the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) and that the certificate establishes the status of the product and the applicant for the certificate in the exporting country.
She however lamented that despite efforts to ensure product quality, many CPPs getting to Nigeria are fake.
She made it known that substandard and falsified products jeopardize access to safe, efficacious, and affordable medicines, and erode the achievement of universal health coverage in Nigeria, and Africa.
She explained that WHO established a scheme called Certificate of Pharmaceutical Product (CPP) and that the meaning of this is “if we send a CPP out to another country, we are assuring the receiving country that it will be of quality.”
According to her, most of the drugs imported to Nigeria are from South East Asia.
She said: “We have a scheme where before medicines that were approved leave that part of the world, we do pre-shipment testing, and that comes with CPP to assure us of quality, but that is not the case, because through our scheme we have been able to stop over 140 products that were approved for coming in.
“We found out that more than 50 percent of the CPPs that come into our country are fake. Part of those responsible is our people that go to China or India and we are going to deal with it.
“If a company is suspected to be compromising, in two hours we will be there, and we will shut the company down,” she said.
She expressed concern that the prevalence of substandard and falsified medicines in Africa is a major threat to public health and added that the prevalence of falsified medicines in the region is because of limited regulation processes.
She said: “Only about 10 per cent of national regulatory agencies have attained maturity level three. What leads to maturity level three is market control, and that is one of the nine models of maturity level three, so we have a lot of work to do in Africa.
“The NAFDAC’s mandate puts a burden on us to see a reduction in substandard and falsified medicines, both the ones that are locally manufactured and the ones that are imported.”
She said NAFDAC is doing its best to tackle substandard and falsified medicines and products based on three thematic areas, which are to prevent, detect, and respond.
