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African countries urged to collaborate on fighting substandard medical products

Xinhua, August 12, 2015 Adjust font size:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for joint efforts from African countries in addressing the issue of substandard and counterfeit medical products.

Representatives from a number of African countries converged in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa on Tuesday, for a three-day regional training workshop that is focusing on Substandard Spurious Falsely-labelled Falsified Counterfeit medical products (SSFFC).

Speaking at the workshop, Pierre M'Pele, WHO Representative in Ethiopia, underlined the need to strengthen regional collaboration on the issue.

"The workshop aims to establish an alert system whereby African countries can facilitate the communication or exchange of information on the medical products at country level and with neighboring countries, as well as at a global level," said M'Pele.

According to WHO, SSFFC products are deliberately and fraudulently mislabeled with respect to identity or source and may include products with the incorrect ingredients or have insufficient or too much active ingredients as well as fake packaging.

M'Pele said the program is designed to significantly improve the quality and quantity of data concerning the medical products through the systematic and structured reporting via a rapid alert system as well as a more detailed analysis of incidents to be carried out by WHO in order to establish a clearer view of the threat posed to public health by SSFFC medical products.

Over 90 countries across the world are taking part in the WHO global surveillance and monitoring program that has been in place for two years.

Bikila Bayissa, Deputy Director of the Ethiopian Food, Medicine, underlined the importance of creating awareness of the public.

"The first thing is they protect themselves from these substandard and counterfeit medicines; the second thing is they can notify either the federal regulatory body or other regional regulatory bodies of the availability of these products in their respective areas; and through this we can take the appropriate actions," he said.

He added that the authority is collaborating with various partners including WHO on strengthening the post-market surveillance activity. Endit