A German company offers a counterfeit drug detector in Tanzania

MEDICINE Users in the country are assured of safe and quality medicines of the locally manufactured as well as imported products following the donation of a five mobile mini-laboratory medical equipment by a German company in order to detect fake drugs circulated in the local market. The equipments were handed over early this week in Dar es Salaam to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare. The equipments would be used by the ministry to support government led initiative aimed at halting circulation of counterfeit drugs, which has increasingly becoming a big threat to millions of Tanzanian lives. A German based Pharmaceutical, Chemical and life science company known as Global Pharma Health Fund donated the mini labs to be used by the Ministry of Health in collaboration with its agency for detecting inferior and counterfeit medicines which are said to have dominated Tanzania market. Counterfeit medicines are a serious threat to health care not only in Tanzania but worldwide, says Dr. Karl Ludwig Kley, the Chairman of the Merk Executive Board who officially presented the donation to the health and Social Welfare Minister Dr. Hadji Mponda. He has expressed optimism that his compact laboratory equipments would help improve the structures of drug monitoring and ensuring scarce resources are not wasted on worthless and even hazardous medicines.

Minister for Health and Social Welfare, Dr. Hadji Mponda


Dr. Mponda has however, assured Tanzanians that the equipments will help to intensify the country's fight against counterfeit hospital medicines as the compacts have the ability to detect products quickly and cost efficiently and reliably. He says, his ministry through its agency Tanzania Food and Drug Authority (TFDA) instituted a quality assurance program in the country in 2002 in order to check counterfeit drugs which has so far shown a tremendous progress indeed. The program which had been funded by World Health Organization aimed to screen the quality of medicines entering Tanzania market from foreign and domestic manufacturers and to a greater extent it has denied the market entry to substandard and counterfeit medical products. Among other objectives the program intends to develop is an appropriate and comprehensive national quality assurance system that would be able of easing to a greater extent that both imported and locally manufactured medicines meet. Fake and counterfeit drugs is a global problem and its negative effects are felt by many countries, and in view of this, it therefore requires massive support from all stakeholders and key players in the country, says TFDA's Director of Laboratory Services Ms. Charys Ugulum. According to her, TFDA has put down effective and strategic measures in order to eradicate the escalating phenomenon, and therefore fight against unscrupulous traders in the country who are fond of doing such malpractices. According to the International Police Organization (Interpol) estimates that up to 30 percent of all medicines in Africa are either counterfeit or of inferior quality.