Nigeria’s National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has said contrary to report that 70 per cent of medicine in circulation in the country are fake, only about 15 per cent have been confirmed to be substandard.
Speaking at the official inauguration of 73 vehicles acquired by the agency to help in its enforcement operations, the Director General of the agency, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye said as part of the consideration for certification of the Maturity Level 3 by the World Health Organisation (WHO), NAFDAC had developed capacity to detection of fake drugs.
She said: “There was a rumour that about 70 per cent of medicine in circulation within the country are fake. That is not true. It is about 13 per cent or 15 per cent because we doing what called risk-based sampling for products that we know can be easily faked.
“It is part of consideration for our maturity Level 3. It is part of the capacity that earned us the Maturity Level 3.
“We have mechanisms in place to go after any product that could be easily faked and then resolve it and know how much of it is there.
“But we are going to be mitigating it. As we speak, our staff are uploading some tools on their laptops and we are going to using a device that cost about $57,000 each and we need 40 of them.”
Adeyeye also spoke on the progress of expansion work at the agency’s vaccine laboratory at Oshodi in Lagos state, saying that it will be ready within the next 12 months.
Onyebuchi Ezigbo in Abuja
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