BY JIMITOTA ONOYUME
PORT HARCOURT— EXPIRED drugs worth N4million have been handed over to the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, for destruction by pharmacists in Rivers State.
Making the handover at the Federal Secretariat, Port Harcourt, chairman of the state chapter of Association of Community Pharmacists of Nigeria, ACPN, Dame Priscilla Nosiri, said members brought the drugs when they realised they had expired.
As a rule, according to her, pharmacists in the state do not sell expired drugs. They assemble them and later take them to NAFDAC, which is the appropriate body, for disposal.
She said, “these drugs are worth about N4million, collected voluntarily by the Association of Community Pharmacists of Nigeria, Rivers State branch and today (yesterday) we are handing them over to NAFDAC for proper disposal.”
“We (ACPN) are doing this because the law says we can collect these expired drugs, but we should not dispose; because it is NAFDAC that has the constitutional rights to properly dispose of such drugs,”
“The collection of these drugs is done yearly, but we will compare them and wait for our headquarters to confirm their status before we can properly dispose of them. I want to use this opportunity to thank the ACPN for voluntarily handing over these drugs to us.
“The NAFDAC ACT N1 LFN and C-34 also empowers it to set up taskforce on fake and counterfeit drugs in Nigeria,” the NAFDAC official explained.
The ACPN at a lecture later organised to mark World No Tobacco Day cautioned against smoking of cigarette, noting that it is more injurious to human health because of the high concentration of tar content .
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NAFDAC to destroy N4m worth of expired drugs