Set up ad hoc committee on drugs scarcity

Pharmacists under the aegis of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN), in a communiqué released after its National Council meeting in Kano recently, said the impact of the current paucity of foreign exchange in the country was gradually grinding operations in drugs manufacturing and importation outlets to a halt.  They appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari […]

Pharmacists under the aegis of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN), in a communiqué released after its National Council meeting in Kano recently, said the impact of the current paucity of foreign exchange in the country was gradually grinding operations in drugs manufacturing and importation outlets to a halt.  They appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to urgently intervene to prevent an impending national calamity which could lead to avoidable deaths.
Drug shortages have had a profound and widespread impact on the quality of health care in Nigeria. In both public and private health care delivery centres, essential drugs to handle life-threatening ailments are not available.  Over the years, drug shortages had been caused by many factors, including difficulties in acquiring critical raw materials, low technology in local production, poor infrastructure, the lack of credit facility, complex regulatory issues, and faulty business decisions, as well as many other disturbances within the supply chain.
The implications for these are diverse, among them the substitution of safe and effective therapies with alternative treatments, compromising or delaying medical procedures, or causing medication errors. Drug shortage also significantly burdens health care providers and health care facility finances and personnel.
Before the current difficult forex regime, pharmacists had lamented the scarcity of essential drugs for even common ailments like fever and malaria. In some cases, patients had died as a result of the poor quality of pharmaceutical drugs prescribed for them in substitution for high quality products. Those who face terminal ailments, like cancer, are worst hit. There is the lack of vital drugs to deal with the deadly disease, hence many patients resort to importation at highly exorbitant rates. Those who cannot raise the huge sums of money required for the importation of such drugs have had to wait for death.
The Federal Government should not ignore this alarm raised by pharmacists because at a time when the exchange rate hovered between N120 and N150 to a dollar, many counterfeit drugs were ferried into Nigeria in spite of the activities of the National Agency for Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC). If the criminal importers defied the regulatory agency when it was cheaper to import pharmaceutical drugs, what the desperate businessmen would do under the current dispensation could be better imagined. That is why we call on government to set up a special committee to brainstorm on the solution to this intricate problem.
We suggest that government should establish an intervention fund that will provide credit facilities to manufacturers of pharmaceutical drugs in Nigeria, to enable them import raw materials for the production of essential drugs. This special fund should be accessible at a single digit interest rate. In addition, it would not be out of place for the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to provide importers of specific pharmaceutical drugs with foreign exchange at a concessionary rate, perhaps, at N197 to a dollar. If foreign Non-Governmental Organization (NGOs) could provide HIV/AIDs drugs, polio vaccines, anti-malaria treated nets to Nigerians for free, it would not be too much for us to demonstrate the value we attach to the health of Nigerians by setting aside some forex for the importation of life-saving pharmaceutical drugs.
Furthermore, we challenge our pharmaceutical and medical research institutes to rise to the occasion, by embarking on research into local solutions to some of ailments whose drugs are difficult to come by. Those who have made discoveries should publicize them so that manufacturers of pharmaceutical drugs could buy into them and mass-produce the drugs.
We call of NAFDAC to be very vigilant at a challenging period like this. Now that it is difficult to access foreign exchange, criminal businessmen could begin to import low quality drugs, and self-styled local producers could begin to counterfeit those drugs that are in high demand by patients. NAFDAC must stop them.