Nigeria gets tough with illegal medicine sellers

The local authorities in Lagos, Nigeria, have arrested eight people and shut down 20 stores as part of a crackdown on the trade in illegal medicines.

Meanwhile, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has arrested 21 people in a separate operation that led to the seizure of a large number of expired, counterfeit and unregistered medicines, according to a report in local newspaper This Day.

The Lagos State Government said the 20 shops – one pharmacy and 19 ‘patent medicine’ stores – were suspected of a range of illegal activities, including the sale of unlicensed drugs, operating without a license and the sale of counterfeit medicines.

Patent medicine vendors with no training in pharmacy sprang up in Nigeria to meet a chronic shortage of trained pharmacists in the country and are regularly used by Nigerians who self-medicate for diseases.

Although access to registered pharmacists is improving, PMVs are still a major element in the medicines supply chain. For example, a study conducted by Ibadan University and published in 2008 found that they are the single largest source of malaria treatments for Nigerians.

For that reason efforts have focused on weeding out the bad vendors while providing support to those which operate within the guidelines, and the current action by the country’s Task Force on Counterfeit, Fake Drugs and Unwholesome Processed Foods reflects that policy.

However, the Ibadan study suggests that problems exist within the legitimate PMV network as well. It found that PMVs tended to supply the cheapest and least effective medicines for malaria, often as a monotherapy, and rarely offered the preferred treatment regimen (artemisinin-based combination therapy or ACT).

Nigeria has banned the use of single-agent treatments for malaria and last week launched a $225m subsidy programme to make it easier for malaria sufferers to get access to ACT.

The malaria study, which can be accessed here, makes a number of recommendations to improve the PMV network in Nigeria, including government provision of training and regulatory and other changes to discourage supply of substandard drugs.

NAFDAC operation

Illegal pharmacies and PMVs were also the focus of the NAFDAC raids, which netted products valued at approximately 1 million Naira (around €5,000).

NAFDAC Director General Dr. Paul Orhili said the agency had impounded about 700m Naira-worth of illegal medicines and food since he replaced Prof. Dora Akunyili earlier this year.