The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, has said that with the amount of efforts its staff is putting in to ensure their job is done right, Nigeria is very well on its way to attain maturity level 4 status, which will give Nigerian products the status to trade and compete globally
The Director General of NAFDAC, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, speaking to reporters in Abuja, during the commissioning of newly purchased staff vehicles, said the agency was working on what she referred to as risk based sampling of products that will help detect when a product is fake and have them flushed from the market
She also debunked the claims that Nigeria has a high amount of about 70 percent of fake medicines in circulation. Clearing the air, that it was 13-15 percent
Prof. Adeyeye, added that the Agency was very much In the process of getting rid of them as some factories have been shut down in this regard and their products destroyed after sending warnings across to them to do the needful
When she was asked on when the agency would attain maturity level 4, replied “I don’t want to give timeline, unless to my staff. “
“With the event of yesterday, we have started working on maturity level 4. Sincerely speaking, to get to maturity level 4,will take us at least one year because many things have to be put in place.”
“As we speak, it is part of our maturity level consideration, we have to show that we have things in place to go after products that are fake. We are going to be mitigating it.
“Our staff are working on offloading some tools on laptops. I am going to be using a device that costs about $57,000
“We will have 40 of the devices. It’s like this cell phone. You place it on the table and it will show both the quality and the quantity. We are doing that on the side because that is what they want to see, that we are putting all these in place.
“There was some rumours from somewhere that 70 percent of our medicines are not good. That is a lie, that is not true. I will say about 15 percent, because we are doing what is called risk based sampling of products that we know can be easily fake
Prof. Adeyeye stated that the same track and trace method, being used by the Agency to successfully track the location of COVID-19 vaccines across the country, will be employed to track antimalaria, anti-HIV/AIDS and antituberculosis medicines to ascertain the quality and quantity of the drugs in circulation.
She said “We are also doing track and trace, it is highly technical. We are doing that to mitigate substandard fortified medicines but it is not something we do overnight.
“We started with COVID-19 vaccines. For the COVID-19,we know where every vaccine is in the country because of the track and trade technology.
“We are going to start doing that over antimalaria, antituberculosis ,and anti-HIV/AIDS. That is coming through global fund support. So we are expanding it, we are already engaging our local manufacturers to put that barcoding tract and trade in place so that we can monitor their own products from the manufacturer to the pharmacist that would dispense in the hospital or the practice setting, drug and others