FEC approves NAFDAC devices to detect fake and substandard drugs devices

FEC approves NAFDAC devices to detect fake and substandard drugs devices

Abiodun OBA

The Federal Executive Council has approved the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration (NAFDAC) equipment to upgrade and scale up its capacity to be able to detect fake and substandard drugs and other materials.

The Minister of Health, Dr Osagie Ehanire, made this known when he briefed State House correspondents on the outcome of the Council meeting in Abuja on Wednesday.

Ehanire said: “The first memo was for procurement of about 40 scam devices, which are mobile scan devices to be able to recognise fake and substandard drugs brought in either across the border or found within the country.

“These are like rapid diagnostic kits tests, which also relieve the laboratories because normally you have to take samples to the laboratories, it takes a long time, several days and lead to some delays. So having a through scan allows us to have faster access.

“The second memo is about laboratory strengthening, improving and upgrading all of our six laboratories for NAFDAC for for testing materials that are brought into the country.

“Both of these contribute strongly to what we call the bench benchmarks for NAFDAC to be able to allow the manufacture of vaccines in Nigeria.

“It needs what we call the maturity level 3 of the World Health Organisation, to be able to start manufacturing, we have ambitions to start manufacturing vaccines and the federal government owns 49% of shares in the company called Bio-Vaccines that hopes to use technology imported from outside to make vaccines and getting this benchmark maturity level 3 is a condition for it.

“So both of these memos, the upscaling of laboratory capacity and the ability to speed up and make diagnostics more accurate in respective of fake and substandard drugs, will help us to push to apply for maturity level 3 for the health sector.’’