South Sudan: We Need Law To Control Selling of Human Drugs.
By Wenne Madyt Dengs, South Sudan
October 8, 2015 (SSB) — Though expired medications retain their potency, no scientific study has ever tested and verified the safety of expired drugs in humans. However, human drugs are not supposed to be sold by everybody like firewood and charcoal. There must be a law that licenses the operation of pharmacies, clinics and private hospitals in the country to secure better health care to the citizens.
Most of the foreign health care centers which are operating under the auspices of foreign medical personnel give our people drugs which are either expired or irrelevant to the disease that they are prescribed to treat. In most cases, you may realize that they are handling fatal diseases like Hepatitis and HIV/AIDS in their local clinics cheating patients that it’s either Malaria or typhoid.
The illiteracy and lack of trust from our civil population towards our national medical centers is the immediate cause of rampant spreading of diseases without control. However, foreign medical centers sell expired drugs to our local citizens with throat-cutting prices, and our people never recognize as they are blind and desperate for treatment.
Most of the drug stores from Juba to the grassroots are not conducive for human drugs to be kept in them. Noting storage in heat and high humidity may shorten a drug’s half-life; The Medical Letter report also acknowledges that in many published studies a variety of medications stored under “stress” conditions remained chemically and physically stable for up to nine years beyond their expiration dates. Generally, liquid drugs are not as stable as solid dosages, and should a liquid become cloudy, discolored, or show signs of precipitation, it should not be used.
Their conditions are beyond what is demanded of medicine to be preserved. Those corrugated-iron sheet shops in peripheral estates in most of the cities never support true temperatures where a human medicine should be well-kept; their temperatures range from 400C to 450C which is not advisable. (I am not medical personnel to give vivid description but I hope you will persevere).
To assure that a drug product meets applicable standards of identity, strength, quality, and purity at the time of use, it bears an expiration date determined by appropriate stability testing,” reads the regulation. And it’s as if those who drugs in these building never read what is written on the base or back of the container or carton were these drugs are packaged or maybe they are blinded by profit that they are intending to grab from uneducated and ignorant society. It is clearly inscribed that “Keep all drugs in cool and dark place”….doesn’t it need workshop to read these eight words? I think no!
I am advising if somebody can hear, we need a law that will guide the selling of human drugs in South Sudan. Ministry of health should have a chamber of standard to control the movement of drugs and give license to the pharmacies, clinics and private hospital to curb the selling of expired drugs to local citizens. This chamber will be able to control drugs entry from borders and airport and it will be providing critical screening of medicine before they are smuggled in with their expired status.
This chamber will also be able to supervise the conditions of all drug-stores and advise their owners whenever necessary. The expiration date of most medicines is 12 to 60 months after manufacture, pharmacists further shorten the time a medicine can be used when they add their own “discard after” or “beyond-use” date to the prescription label itself.
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