Huge gains in battle against fake drugs, government says

The proportion of fake and often deadly medicines in Nigeria has dropped from nearly 70 percent circulating in 2002 to less than 10 percent three years later, according to the country’s drug control agency. The figures are preliminary results from a new government survey of the counterfeit drug trade, Dora Akunyili, head of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), told IRIN this week. In Africa’s most populous country of some 126 million people, countless products have a prettily packaged and cheaper imitation for sale. Medicines are no exception. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that the trade in counterfeit and sub-standard drugs is worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually in Nigeria and about US $32 billion worldwide. Year on year there has been a steady drop in the number of fake medicines on the street, according to the NAFDAC survey completed in August and sponsored by the WHO and the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID). The government puts the success down to their tough action against dealers and traders. In the last four years NAFDAC has convicted 38 dealers and destroyed fake products that would have yielded about US $60 million for illegal traders, Akunyili said. Deaths linked to phoney medicines are on the decrease, too. “The report we are getting from hospitals is that death rates from treatment failures due to fake drugs have dropped considerably,” said Akunyili. DFID and WHO declined to comment in detail on the preliminary report. “The findings are very encouraging but it’s important that the NAFDAC continue its good work,” a DFID spokesperson who declined to be named told IRIN by phone from London. One of the most encouraging developments in the country, Akunyili said, is that the legitimate drug industry is starting to grow. When the market is full of fake medicines, Akunyili said, no legitimate business can hope to function. “How can you compete with someone busy packing chalk into capsules?” But, she said, “The confidence of investors in the pharmaceutical industry is returning, with 20 new drug manufacturing outfits established in Nigeria in the last four years,” she said. The battle is not over yet. Traffickers are not giving up easily and are seeking new ways to smuggle their bogus wares. Last year authorities at the Lagos port intercepted 32 containers of phoney drugs hidden in spare car parts and imported shirts stuffed with painkillers. Nigeria is trying to further stem the flow of counterfeit medicines with new import controls, including a requirement that all documents related to drug imports go through NAFDAC. NAFDAC last month ruled that all antibiotics, psychoactive and injected drugs be available by prescription only. Health experts say in order to root out fake drugs, above all the market stalls and vendors selling them must be targeted. The vendors, who often use illegal traffickers, are commonplace in every market, outnumbering legal pharmacies, medical experts say. “The solution is to close all open drug markets,” Wole Atoyebi, president of the Nigerian Medical Association, said, calling the sites “an abnormality.” The NAFDAC’s Akunyili agreed, but said that the lack of an effective medicine distribution system in Nigeria remains a huge obstacle. “Almost all drug manufacturers and importers supply to these open drug markets,” she said. “We can’t close these markets now even if we want.” NAFDAC plans to establish more drug distribution centres to be controlled by health professionals, hoping to gradually suffocate the illegal market. Akunyili knows first-hand the dangers of trying to smash such a lucrative business. In 2003 after a number of death threats, gunmen fired at her, the bullet grazing her skull. But the professor of pharmacy is more than a detached expert and will not give up her work, even at the risk of losing her life. She said bogus medicines killed her sister.