Nigeria: Nation Leads in Fight Against Fake Drugs – NAFDAC DG

Sola Ogundipe

23 July 2011

interview

The war against fake and counterfeit medicines is one that the National Agency For Food & Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, has fought for several years. Counterfeit medicines were first discovered in Nigeria in 1968 but the situation progressively worsened.

By 2001, more than 40 percent of medicines in circulation nationwide were fake. Evaluations showed that by 2005, the incidence of counterfeit medicines dropped to 15.7 percent only to rise to an unprecedented 64 percent in 2008. This was the picture in January 2009 when Dr Paul Orhii took over the mantle of leadership as Director General of the Agency. Even then, the new Director General already had the war against fake and counterfeit medicines at the centre of the Agency’s agenda.

In this interview with Rotimi Ajayi and Sola Ogundipe, Orhii gives a rundown of the running battle NAFDAC has been having, tackling the “merchants of death” who perpetrate the menace of fake and substandard drugs in the country.

Excerpts:

Since you became DG in January 2009, much of NAFDAC’s activities has been about tackling counterfeit medicine. Why the primary focus on counterfeit medicines?

BURNT: Fake drugs

There is no way you can talk about what we have done in NAFDAC without mentioning counterfeit medicines, even though NAFDAC’s activities are broad and include the regulation of food, bottled water, cosmetics, chemicals and many other things.

The war against fake and counterfeit medicines is at the centre because it has been made a topic at NAFDAC. It has been a problem this country has encountered and which NAFDAC has fought to some extent with great success. The was picture when I came on board in January 2009.

An evaluation in 2008 by the World Health Organization of the quality of anti-malaria that were in circulation in 14 African countries discovered that Nigeria had the worst situation among all the countries that were evaluated. It showed 64 percent of the anti-malarial drugs in the circulation in Nigeria at that time were either fake or substandard. To tackle this, what we did was first and foremost, to try to expand on those things that Prof. Akunyili started that worked so well in helping to reduce the situation of counterfeit medicine to 15.7 percent from more than 40 percent.

Dr Paul Orhii, DG, NAFDAC

The only thing we may not have done much was the massive public enlightenment campaign, but every other thing was done. We expanded and collaborated internationally, engaged countries where we saw that most of our medicines were coming from in an effort to stop counterfeit medicine at source.

We found out that more than 70 percent of essential medicines consumed in this country were imported mainly from India and China and then it made sense to know that most of the counterfeit were also coming from those countries, so what we decided to do was to immediately engage these two countries to see how they could help us to stop fake medicine from coming at all.

What synergies has NAFDAC built with sister agencies in tackling this menace?

We have synergies with sister agencies because we know that we cannot win this war fighting alone. We have been closer to the Nigerian Customs Service, Nigerian Immigration Service, Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), NDLEA and many others. For example, the Customs now have a system that enables them to know the content of any container before it arrives Nigeria.

The Customs have allowed us access to that system where we are able to view the contents of a container and if we believe that the container may have something that is of interest to us. We can insist that we want to inspect that container when it comes and the Customs never releases the container until we have inspected it. We want to build into their e-clearance system to help us clear goods within 24 hours.

What are your main challenges?

Financial problems are paramount among what we are encountering. Even the vehicles that we have are old Peugeot 504 cars and we have one or two for local government areas, and most of the time they are broken down.

If you take for example Kano with 44 local government areas, how are you going to cover it with two vehicles that are always breaking down? So we decided to engage the local government chairmen and asked that they they set up NAFDAC desks so that they can call us and report fake products that are in the system, especially drug hawking and illegal advertisement of herbal medicine.

We convened the meeting of all local government chairmen and we requested that each of them set up a NAFDAC desk because we are not present in every local government area. They have responded. Jigawa State for example has set up. All the local government areas have active NAFDAC desks.

Kano State has responded by setting up a mobile court to speedily try people who are caught hawking drugs. Edo State has also responded and set up NAFDAC desks and they are requesting us to conduct a workshop for them to educate the local government desks. So, we are going around and we want to be present at the grassroots.

We are involving the traditional rulers, the local government areas to help us police the incidence of counterfeit medicines and other unwholesome regulated products, expired food products, food products not manufactured according to good manufacturing practices and good hygiene programme in the local government areas.

Which technologies have worked for you?

One of the technologies is the Truscan. With this, we can quickly scan imported products at the Ports and release them on time without compromising their quality. It is a new invention by the US military; it can quickly tell whether the product is genuine or fake. The pharmaceutical companies were using it to evaluate the quality of their active pharmaceutical ingredients. So we got the Truscan and as a medicine regulatory agency, we have become the first in the world to use it to detect the quality of medicines. Recently, we were at meeting in London and we found out that the US Food and Drug Administration had started using it too.

Germany, Sweden, Canada, and most advanced countries have also started using the Truscan now to check the incidence of fake medicine in their systems.

People often claim they bought fake drugs from a genuine pharmacy. How is this possible?

We found out that sometimes, genuine distributors will get a certain consignment of the good medicine and then take a sample of that and go to another country and order a counterfeit of that to be manufactured and then mix them together and start selling to unsuspecting pharmacies.

So, all we do is to close down such pharmacy and the owners would tell us where they purchased this medicine. We would then follow all the way to the last person who can tell us where they got the medicine from. Now, pharmacies are more careful in trying to get their medicine.

How much has the incidence of fake drugs in Nigeria reduced?

Within a year, we have been able to reduce, especially in the major cities, the incidence of fake medicine to just about 5 percent in Lagos, in Abuja, in Kano and in Kaduna. That does not mean that fighting counterfeit is such that once you reduced it, you can go back and lie-down that it has been reduced.

Counterfeiting is like a balloon filled with water; you push it on one side, it goes and waits for your hands, and if you want to take the hands, it can bounce back even stronger. So, that is what we saw when NAFDAC fought counterfeiting and reduced it to 15.7 percent, but by 2008, we found out that more than the 64 percent of the anti-malaria drugs in the circulation were either fake or substandard. So, you cannot celebrate that you have gained some victory, especially now that it is even more dangerous.

Is it true that you also wage war against hard drugs?

We have waged war against cocaine; most of the drug barons now are diverting their income into manufacturing counterfeit drugs.

It is more lucrative, less risky, even when you are caught, the punishment is very light. They engage in it and they have made it more sophisticated, internationalised the business. It has been more global and more militarized. Even Europe which was thought didn’t have counterfeit medicine, they have found the market of counterfeit medicine worth more than 10.5 million Euros. So, counterfeit medicine is a global phenomenon.

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