Health Ministry to clamp down on producers of fake medicines
In order to rid the market of fake medications, the Health Ministry has now liaised with the police to identify, apprehend and prosecute people who are engaged in such are acts.
Ghana was unfortunately ranked as the 6th largest producer of fake drugs in the world by the European Union in 2013.
According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) estimates, over 800, 000 people, die each year due to the use of counterfeit medicines.
This main cause of the situation is due to these drugs on the market which is less expensive and more accessible than genuine ones.
Health Minister, Kwaku Agyemang Manu while speaking at the launch of the Ghana Global Standards Project for Pharmaceutical Traceability, was optimistic that the new strategy adopted will help bring culprits to book
The Ghana Global Standards Project has the capacity to identify, capture and exchange product information among all entities within the supply chain.
“The adoption of Ghana will be beneficial in tracing substandard and falsified medicines detected in the legitimate supply chain. It also helps address the risk associated with patient safety and medicine administration, thereby reducing the financial burden on the National Health Insurance Scheme.”
“The people are murderers, and they must be sentenced to death, but we do not have any means orb system to catch them and I believe that we are getting closer to unveiling strategies to grab them and see how hard we can punish them”, the Minister said.
Ghana Global Standards Project is a means to strengthen the pharmaceutical industry in developing and least developed countries to contribute to improved access to essential medicines.
This project has also covered the broader assessment of Ghanaian companies during 2016.
This project is being supported by The West African Health Organization (WAHO a regional project which has enabled the continuation of this work, including the provision of technical guidance to Ghanaian manufacturers and for the incorporation of the Ghana roadmap approach into an ECOWAS GMP roadmap framework.
Ghana has the second-largest pharmaceutical manufacturing sector in the ECOWAS Region with 38 manufacturers registered with the FDA, and over 30 actively producing, directly employing over 5,000 people.
