He said, “A lot of us, manufacturers, are concentrated in the urban centres, state capitals and towns while 60 per cent to 70 per cent of Nigerians living in the hinterlands do not have access to our quality medicines. “And if you go by the recent statistics released by some international organisations and the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, 60 per cent to 70 per cent of medicines circulating in these hinterlands are either substandard or outright fake because manufacturers have refused to go there. Practising pharmacists do not go there; even the people there are scanty and not under any form of regulation; so everybody now goes there to do whatever they like.

 

“NAFDAC also hardly goes there to see what our people in the hinterland are doing and you see all these people using motorbikes and taking drugs to these villages. Since they don’t have access to what pharmaceutical firms are producing, they are bound to buy what they see.”

 

The group said that it had collaborated with the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria, headed by prominent businessmen such as Aliko Dangote and Jim Ovia because their businesses had strong supply chain footprints, adding that the aim of the partnership was to increase access to drugs for  consumers all over the country.

 

The Executive Secretary, PMG-MAN, Dr. Peter Adigwe, said,  “Our partnership with the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria enables us to bring high affordable and sustainably available local medicine closer to ordinary Nigerians.”

 

The Chief Executive Officer, Private Health Alliance of Nigeria, Mr. Muntaga Umar-Sadiq, said that the organisation thought about the health sector beyond the providers to look at fiscal and regulatory policies that could improve both enabling environment for manufacturing of medicine and access by consumers.

 

 

Source:MWN