NAFDAC raises alarm over fake certificates of imported pharmaceutical products

The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, says more than 50 per cent of certificates of pharmaceutical products that are imported into Nigeria are fake.

The Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof Mojisola Adeyeye, disclosed this at the stakeholders’ engagement meeting with regulators, policymakers, and law enforcement agencies on Monday in Abuja.

The certificate of a pharmaceutical product is issued in the format recommended by the World Health Organisation, WHO, and it establishes the status of the pharmaceutical product and the applicant for the certificate in the exporting country. It is for a single product only since manufacturing arrangements and approved information for different dosage forms and different strengths can vary.

Adeyeye said that substandard and falsified products threaten access to safe efficacious and affordable medicines, and undermine the achievement of universal health coverage in Nigeria, and Africa.

Adeyeye said, “We have 55 countries in Africa and we belong to the Member States globally and we agreed to ensure that products coming to the region are of quality and WHO created a scheme called certificate of pharmaceutical product, and what this means is that if we send a certificate of pharmaceutical product out to another country, we are assuring the receiving country that it will be of quality.

“Most of our medicines come from South East Asia and we belong to the member states too.

“ 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 from coming in.”