Nigeria's Dr. Paul Botwev Orhii chairs WHO's MSM meeting in Geneva.

Dr. Orhii is chairing the meeting in Geneva.
By King James Yiye

Nigeria's representative Dr. Paul Botwev Orhii is leading discussions at the on-going meeting in Geneva of the World Health Organization's Member State Mechanism (MSM) for combating Substandard, Spurious, Falsely-Labeled, Falsified and Counterfeit (SSFFC) medical products.

Dr. Orhii who is the Director General of NAFDAC which stands for the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control in Nigeria was earlier commended by WHO Director General Dr. Margaret Chan at the first MSM meeting held in Buenos Aires, Argentina in November 2012.

Dr. Chan was particular about Dr. Orhii's efforts at bringing down the prevalence of fake anti malaria drugs from 64% to 20% between 2008 and 2012.

Shortly before Dr. Paul Orhii assumed leadership of NAFDAC, the World Health Organization did a study in 2008 to evaluate the quality of anti-malaria drugs in 14 African countries including Nigeria, the study showed that the situation in Nigeria was worse than all the other countries combined.

"In Nigeria at that time, more than 60% of anti-malaria drugs were either fake or substandard, from a public health perspective, either fake or substandard both have public health implication because, the patient is not taking drugs that are of good quality, sometimes the active pharmaceutical ingredients are not strong enough to kill the micro-organisms but they create resistance strains on the parasites that are not treatable with even the most effective medicines, so this is very dangerous", Dr. Orhii told me in an interview in Buenos Aires.

The meeting in Geneva will among other things examine porogress made by Member States since the last meeting in Buenos Aires.

MSM is a novel platform created by the WHO to frontally tackle the global problem of spurious, substandard and counterfeit medicine, in which the Director General of NAFDAC, Dr. Paul Orhii has been widely acknowledged as the leading crusader. The scope of work of the new steering committee of the MSM includes broadening access of member nations to affordable medical products, strengthening their regulatory capacity and quality control laboratories, clarifying the scope of SSFFC and enhancing exchange of information and experience among drug regulatory authorities worldwide.

MSM comprises of the regional blocs of the WHO; the European Union, African Union, Arab Union, USA and Latin America.

Details of the Geneva meeting will be made available at www.askingmedia.blogspot.com and ASKiNG Media partner Radio Stations nationwide