Nigeria says counterfeits now 5 per cent of drug market

The authorities in Nigeria are claiming considerable progress in the fight against counterfeit medicines, suggesting that only around 5 per cent of drugs in the supply chain are fake or otherwise compromised in their quality.

If confirmed, the finding marks a fantastic achievement for a country in which 40-70 per cent of medicines were found to be fake in a study carried out Nigeria's National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) in 2001.

The 5 per cent claim was made by Adefolarin Adeleke, a deputy director with NAFDAC, in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria. The figure follows a trend witnessed earlier when a 2005 NAFDAC survey found a counterfeit/substandard rate of around 17 per cent.

The latest data comes from an ongoing survey of the medicines market in Nigeria which has so far taken in 29 of the 36 states in the country and sampled more than 6,000 products on sales at over 2,000 retail outlets.

As expected, malaria drugs have featured prominently among the samples found to be counterfeit, substandard, expired or unregistered. Most Nigerians purchase their own drugs to self-medicate for malaria, and the country accounts for roughly half the 83 million cases of malaria in West Africa.

The reduction in counterfeit and substandard medicines in Nigeria comes on the back of heroic efforts by NAFDAC and other government departments to combat the trade, drawing on a combination of public awareness campaigns, tougher penalties for counterfeiters, increased monitoring of drug quality in the marketplace and enforcement actions to close outlets found to be selling illegal medicines.

Earlier this week, NAFDAC said it had seized 20m naira-worth ($125,000) of fake drugs from an illegal facility in Onitsha, Anambra, including three types of antimalarial, tonic and vitamin products used in children and a drug used to treat diabetes.