More than 50 per cent of certificates of pharmaceutical products that are imported into Nigeria are fake, says the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC).

Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof Christianah Adeyeye, disclosed this, yesterday, at the stakeholders’ engagement meeting with regulators, policymakers and law enforcement agencies in Abuja.

The Certificate of a Pharmaceutical Product (CPP) is issued in the format recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO), and it establishes the status of the pharmaceutical product and the applicant for the certificate in the exporting country. It is for a single product only, since manufacturing arrangements and approved information for different dosage forms and different strengths can vary.

Adeyeye said the stakeholders’ engagement was to ensure that medical products in circulation were of the right quality, safe and efficacious.

She noted that substandard and falsified products threaten access to safe, efficacious and affordable medicines, and undermine the achievement of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in Africa.

The NAFDAC boss said: “We have 55 countries in Africa and we are member states, who agreed to ensure that products coming to the region are of quality. WHO created a scheme called CPP, and what this means is that if we send a CPP out to another country, we are assuring the receiving country that it will be of quality.

“Most of our medicines come from South-East Asia and we belong to the member states too. We have a scheme where, before medicines that are approved leave that part of the world, we do pre-shipment testing, and that comes with CPP to assure us of quality. But that is not the case, because through our scheme, we have been able to stop over 140 products that were approved from coming in. We found out that more than 50 per cent of the CPPs that come into our country are fake. Part of the responsibility is our people that go to China or India, but we are going to deal with it.”