By Independent
The National Agency for Foods and Drug
Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has assured corporate organisation,
Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and private establishments of the availability of globally recognised
laboratories to confirm the quality of Finished Pharmaceutical Products (FPP)
in the country.
The Director General of NAFDAC, Yetunde Oni, gave
the assurance while signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Catholic
Relief Services (CRS) for the sampling and testing of Finished Pharmaceutical
Products from private sector under the Global Fund support, in Abuja, recently.
She disclosed that four NAFDAC laboratories spread
in different parts of the country have attained ISO 17025 accredited.
CRS is one of the world’s largest private
voluntary organisations, supporting international relief and development work
in more than 100 countries and territories around the world.
As a Principal Recipient of the Global Fund
malaria grant in Nigeria, CRS in line with the Global Fund’s regulations is
required to monitor the quality of FPPs including ACTs,
Sulfadoxine/pyrimethamine, and Artesunate injections in the supply pipeline.
Mrs Oni further disclosed that the Central Drug
Control Laboratory in Yaba, Lagos, is about to get World Health Organisation (WHO) pre-qualification. This is
apart from the ISO 17025 accreditation which it has already obtained.
“And so, we will have the two accreditations in
place. This means that our equipment will be top-notch, chemicals, consumables
are readily available and we have put all the necessary strategies in place to
ensure that we are not in want at any particular point in time.
“We have gotten the approval to bulk purchase our
equipment, chemicals, consumables, reference standards and whatever we need to
work in the lab to purchase them from Germany. We have signed a Memorandum of
Understanding (MoU) for five years.
“These are all efforts to ensure quality of
service from the laboratories is not undermined at all,” she said.
She further explained that: “We have four
laboratories of NAFDAC out of the seven that we have in the six geopolitical
zones of the country have achieved ISO 17025 accredited.
“Three out of these four analyse drugs, one is
specifically dedicated to food and allied products. These are the Central Drug
Control Lab in Yaba, the Area lab in Kaduna, the Agulu laboratory in the
south-eastern part of the country. These three analyse drugs in addition to
other regulated products of the agency.
“The results of products analysed from these
laboratories can compete with the results from other laboratories in other
parts of the world.”
Speaking, the Country Representative of CRS,
Rebecca Hallam, noted that the routine monitoring of the quality of Finished
Pharmaceutical Products was very key to her organisation as well as the Global
Fund.
She disclosed that before the signing of the MoU
with NAFDAC, “all implementers in Nigeria used to send their samples to
laboratories outside of Nigeria for testing. We, therefore congratulate NAFDAC
for the hard work towards achieving her ISO 17025 accreditation.”
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