ENUGU, 6 April 2007 (IRIN) - ENUGU, 6 April 2007 (IRIN) - Simon Okpoko, 42, is chairman of taskforce to stop the sale of fake pharmaceutical drugs at Ogbutu market in eastern Nigeria.

"I've been selling drugs in this market for 20 years but it was only around three years ago that we started seeing fake ones. Maybe there were fakes before then but we didn't know about it. We only really became aware of the problem when NAFDAC [National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control] and the Ministry of Health came to us and gave us workshops to show us the difference.

Since then we've found all kinds of fakes, from headache tablets to drugs that are supposed to save lives, like antibiotics and anti-malaria drugs.

It's amazing how the packaging can look like the real thing. Sometimes it's just registration numbers that give it away, and sometimes even the numbers are good but it's still fake.

A few are made in Nigeria but anyone can tell that those ones are fake. It's the ones from China and India that are often almost identical to the real thing. And some actually are the real thing but substandard. That means the manufacturer has skimped on the amounts of active ingredients they should have put in each tablet.

The task force I head [in the eastern city of Enugu] can catch them all. We screen every single drug that comes into this market, plus we have two taskforce members operating in each row of stalls and we do spot checks to make sure nothing gets through.

We got a tip-off today that these [he points to a cardboard box full of medicine] were sneaked in. We'll send them off to NAFDAC for verification but I can tell you now that they look pretty fishy to me.

If we catch you deliberately selling fake drugs in this market we will hand you over to NAFDAC [for prosecution] and we have banned at least five other traders from operating here. But the fact is that most of the traders here don't know they are selling fake drugs and do it out of ignorance.

Whatever we find, we seize and hand them over to NAFDAC, which then launches an investigation to try to find the source of the drugs. They start by looking for the wholesaler who sold the fake drugs to our seller and then look for the person who sold it to the wholesaler, trying to get all the way up to the exporter and manufacturer.

I can't tell how far up NAFDAC has gotten but what I can say is that the amount of fake drugs we are finding has dropped drastically, especially since NAFDAC closed down the market nearby in Onitsha [see story].

It costs everyone time and it costs the sellers a lot of money if their drugs are found to be fake. They can't go back to the people that sold it to them to ask for a refund and they don't get any compensation from the government. But I think in the long run it's good for business because people come to buy drugs in this market knowing that what they get here is real."

dh/cs

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