NGO opens anti-counterfeit lab in Kenya

A laboratory providing quality control services has been opened in Nairobi, Kenya, to boost the government's capabilities in fighting the trade in substandard and counterfeit medicines.

The lab is operated by Mission for Essential Drugs and Supplies (MEDS), a charitable non-governmental organisation, and has been ‘pre-qualified’ by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The pre-qualification scheme allows QC laboratories to be inspected by the WHO and obtain a certification that they comply with standards recommended by the agency.

The MEDS lab showed on inspection it was able to carry out physican and chemical analysis of drug products and active pharmaceutical ingredients, identification studies and assays to detect and identify impurities and related substances.

Before now, the only lab in Kenya qualified to carry out testing on medicines quality and identify counterfeit drugs was the government-run National Quality Control Laboratory. However, this unit has reportedly found it difficult to cope with the sheer scale of the counterfeit medicines trade in Kenya, estimated at 15 to 40 per cent of the total drugs market.

The Kenyan government has upgraded the NQCL, which can carry out the same suite of tests as the MEDS lab but is also pre-qualified for biological tests, and is looking at implementing an electronic system to track drug supplies from procurement to the patient.

At a press briefing to showcase the opening of the new lab, Kenya’s Health and Sanitation Minister Anyang’ Nyong’o said it was becoming difficult to stamp out the trade in counterfeit and substandard drugs because of so-called ‘briefcase pharmacists’ who operate outside legitimate supply chain channels.

The issue of counterfeit medicines in Kenya has been hitting the headlines of late thanks to an investigative report by national newspaper The Standard. One issue highlighted by the paper was that Kenya lacks robust drug importation controls.