The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has emphasised the need for the enactment of legislation that will ensure stiffer penalties for the importers of bad medicines into the country.
The Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, made the disclosure in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.
Adeyeye said that the agency would not spare any companies or manufacturers that attempted to bring bad medicines into the country.
According to her, the agency has heightened its Pre-Shipment Testing and, through that, more than 100 shipments of bad medicines have been stopped.
“Some of them have very little. These are things that we have been working on and, despite that, they still want to cut corners with u; so, we started black listing them.
“Any company that made bad and substandard medicines, we black list them and we published some in national dailies.
“I was in India about six weeks ago and one of them said that his company had been blacklisted and I said so if your company is blacklisted you deserve it. It is too bad for you.
“As we speak, we are going to blacklist some other companies.
“We will continue to blacklist companies, and manufacturers and delist the product from our supply chain, delist their product from our database.
“It is not just medicines coming from other countries, it is also medicines within our own region.”
She said NAFDAC, with WHO, conducted a survey and discovered that a few of the companies were trying to cut corners.
“The agency shut the lines down for months which is going into billions of Naira for them.
“It has to hurt them in the pocket in order to have deterrence; unfortunately, if you go to court they will fine them N250,000 or go to jail for five years.
“So I am urging and praying that the time will come when our judiciary will know that medicine kills, bad food kills.
“Right now, as we speak, we have what is called the C34 bill that the House of Representatives repealed the old one and they are actually enacting a new one which essentially contains stiffer penalties.
“When we see countries that are stringent, like the United States that I am familiar with, you break the rules, you pay the time.
“You break the rules, if your company is worth $200million, they will just fine you $215million and that is the end of the company.
“So people’s feet are being put on the fire right from the beginning.
“I pray we will get to that point in Nigeria where the penalty will be stiffer so that people will think twice before they put medicines that will kill people (out there).”
She vowed that NAFDAC would continue to adopt strategies and explore intelligence reports to tackle the menace.
“A few months ago, someone called me that the medicine that NAFDAC approved is making people to run mad.
“I said how can medicine that NAFDAC approved make people mad and asked for the name.
“Immediately we did a sweep operation on the company, we got samples from them, later we called Investigation and Enforcement Directorates to go and evacuate after we got the first lab results.
“It is what we call the bitters and they gave to rats in the lab and the rats die within five minutes.
“This was not the product we approved; they have laced it with marijuana. So people change formula formulation after we have approved.
“So part of what we do now is what is called Risk-Based Sampling.
“If we know that your company is a violator, your product will be at high risk.
“If it is something that is going to be put in delicate parts like eyes or nose it will be at high risk.
“There are different categories of medicines that we have put on high risk,” Adeyeye said.
