Health experts in the country have decried the continuous circulation of fake medical products in the country.
They argued that this development posed a major challenge to the nation’s health sector.
The World Health Organisation recently raised the alarm that countries had begun to experience serious lack of new antibiotics to combat the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance.
The organisation noted that most of the drugs currently in the clinical pipeline were modifications of existing classes of antibiotics and were only short-term solutions, thereby giving a few potential treatment options for those antibiotic-resistant infections identified as posing the greatest threat to health, including drug-resistant tuberculosis, which kills around 250,000 people each year.
The Acting Director-General, National Agency for Food, Drugs Administration and Control, Mr. Ademola Mogbojuri, noted that the continuous circulation and sale of substandard and fake medical products had made many people to use drugs in defiance of doctors’ prescriptions.
This, he said, had led to a wrong perception by the public of the nation’s health sector.
Mogbojuri noted that the problem, which had become a serious threat to global public health and the fight against this nefarious act, required a sustained action by both governmental and non-governmental bodies, adding, “If not, it would continuously result in treatment failure, high treatment cost, development of resistance, loss of confidence in the healthcare providers and healthcare system and may ultimately result in fatality and death.
“We cannot fight fake drugs all alone; that is why we are calling for coordinated actions with several international organisations so that we can reduce to the barest minimum, the incidence of this ugly menace.”
The President, National Association of Health Providers of Nigeria, Dr. Jide Rotilu, noted that due to the use of fake medical products by people, for example, in the treatment of bacterial infections, the bacteria became more resistant to antibiotics.
Rotilu said, “In Nigeria, we don’t need to get any doctor’s prescription before buying our antibiotics from pharmacies or drug stores and that is a serious challenge to the health sector. We just approach drug stores and buy medications without knowing the originality of those products. So, I don’t think there is any remedy, except we clean out all open markets for drugs.
“There are such enormous bacteria and they occur as commencers. So, when they get to a place where they are not supposed to be, then they become pathogenic. In Nigeria, every case of temperature or diarrhea is being regarded as Typhoid and then people buy chloramphenicol on a regular basis from pharmacies, which in some cases, end up with bone marrow infection and, of course, they won’t be able to afford the money for bone transplant, thereby leading to death.”
He lamented the current situation whereby the Ministry of Health and the Pharmaceutical Council were working independently in spite of claims that they both belonged to the country’s health sector.
“Some pharmacies or drug stores work as hospitals, whereby they offer medical services such as blood transfusion to the public, which is not right. I hope that one day sanity will come and the pharmacies will stop selling fake drugs and drugs without prescription from the doctor,” Rotilu said.
He stressed that the recent outbreak of monkeypox, lassa fever, yellow fever, and polio in different parts of the country were results of viral infections, which could be cured by antiviral medications, advising that proper public education and enlightenment about these diseases would go a long way in the effective management of the
outbreak.
“Since most of the antiviral medications work in discrepancies, as most viruses don’t succumb to many drugs, except very few ones, just like the virus that causes cold, catarrh, that go on their own as they run their own course, people should be enlightened on the nature of the diseases, methods of transmission and preventive measures of the diseases,” he said.
