Nigerian Director Appraises 2010
Dr. Paul Orhii, Director General of the Food and Drug Administration and Control for Nigeria, (NAFDAC), described 2010 as “very remarkable and busy” in the fight against fake drugs.
Dr. Paul Orhii, Director General of the Food and Drug Administration and Control for Nigeria, (NAFDAC), described 2010 as "very remarkable and busy" in the fight against fake drugs.
Orhii, whose speech was reported in the Nigerian Daily Independent, said, "We believe in the year 2010, we have done well though more still needs to be done. In the area of fighting counterfeited medicines, we have sustained the fight. This is the first time in the fight that we introduced cutting-edge technologies like the tru-scan which we have now deployed to the villages because we have observed consistently that in the cities, especially in Lagos, Onitsha, Kano, Kaduna and Abuja, that the incidence of fake medicines has come down to five percent. When I talked about this at international conferences people were surprised."
Orhii went on to describe the impact of driving fake drug hawkers out of the major cities. He said that the drug sellers moved to the surrounding areas, and so NAFDAC pursued them in the surrounding suburbs, notably the bordering Ogun State.
In addition to increasing the surveillance areas for fake drug sellers, NAFDAC has recommended to the Justice Department that fake drug sellers should be "jailed for life and their assets confiscated, and if we can prove that the fake product consequently caused the death or injury of a victim,then that victim should be able to get some compensation." In addition, NAFDAC supports the development of whistleblower legislation to reward those that intercede in the distribution of fake drugs.
He proudly recounted the successful counterfeit drug syndicate bust that imported drugs unaccompanied in airplane cargo holds, "When we picked [up] those fellows, within two weeks we discovered medicines worth more than N500m coming in through small luggage and since then, we have seen only few…coming in through the Murtala Mohammed Airport. We have truly done a lot of work in the year 2010."