The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, has revealed that more than 50 per cent of imported pharmaceutical products into the country are fake.
The Director General of NAFDAC, Mojisola Adeyeye, disclosed this during a recent stakeholders’ meeting in Abuja.
She explained that the certificate of a pharmaceutical product (CPP) is expected to follow the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) and it establishes the status of the product and the applicant for the certificate in the exporting country.
According to her, substandard and falsified products threaten access to safe, efficacious, and affordable medicines, and undermine the achievement of universal health coverage in Nigeria, and Africa.
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 per cent 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. “
