New Telegraph

NAFDAC sizes N1.7trn tramadol, destroys N4bn products

Tramadol worth N1.7 trillion has been seized while N4 billion worth of unwholesome food and products have been destroyed across the country, Director General of National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, has revealed.

 

Adeyeye, in a statement issued yesterday in Abuja, also revealed ongoing plans to bring to an end the importation of falsified medicines into the country, through robust partnership with pre-shipment agents in China and India.

 

While noting that 70 per cent of medicines used in Nigeria were still imported with only 30 per cent produced locally, she said attention must be paid to both imported and locally made drugs by the agency. She added that the agency was poised to ending importation of substandard drugs and taking the war against importation of illicit drugs to the source countries.

 

 

Adeyeye explained that despite reading riot acts to laboratories in China and India to make them understand they were responsible for analysing quality of products in their home countries, NAFDAC had to withdraw the approval granted to one of the Clean Report Inspection Agents (CRIA) and several laboratories due to loopholes found in the process. Her words: “We are tackling the issue of substandard, falsified medicines from the source.

These are the ones coming from  China or India. The agency has, in collaboration with Nigerian Customs Service, seized and destroyed SFs, unwholesome foods and other regulated products worth over N4 billion in exercises across the nation.

 

“Tramadol with estimated street value of N1.7 trillion have also been seized. “NAFDAC is now going to the source to ensure that we do pre-shipment analysis. Although pre-shipment analysis has always been there, there were loopholes in that process that are now blocked. “In the past, the laboratories used to be under the control of the agents.

 

 

 

We visited about 19 laboratories across China and India. And we gave them the criteria that they must meet before we choose them as laboratories that can be analysing products that will come to Nigeria. The NAFDAC boss, however, disclosed the agency and the agents were now working more closely with CRIAs and receive their agents’ reports on consignments almost on a daily basis, saving the country the huge impact of being turned into a dumping ground for counterfeit medicines.

 

“This stringency has started yielding dividends as NAFDAC now has encouraging reports from the CRIA Agents and NAFDAC now deals directly with the laboratories used in China and India by the preshipment agents. We are starting from the source to ensure that the medical products or drugs that come into Nigeria are of quality.

 

“We wait for them at the port. Many times, we intercept them because the CRIA agents would have told us about those companies that ought to have gone through them for inspection but did not go.”

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