Liberia sets up regulatory authority to tackle substandard drugs

Liberia's government says it will establish a medicines regulatory authority to oversee the country's pharmaceutical industry and address "the proliferation of substandard and counterfeit medicines in Liberia’s market and public sector supply chain."

The government has signed the Liberian Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Act (LMHRA) into law, officially putting in place the process of setting up the agency. The LMHRA defines the structure, roles and functions of the regulatory authority in accordance with World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines and good regulatory practices.

Liberia is Africa's oldest republic, but has been racked by two civil wars since the late 1980s which left it without stable government, until elections in 2005 saw the current regime under President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf installed.

The state of the country's healthcare system reflects the newness of its government. For example, a study carried out by PQM a few months ago looked at 234 samples of antimalarial medicines collected from outlets in the capital Monrovia and Ghanta, another city situated to the south, and found a high proportion were of poor quality.

Basic screening tests found that 104 of those samples - or 44 per cent - were substandard. High levels of impurities were found in 80 per cent of chloroquine and amodiaquine syrups, which are popular because they are cheap and widely available, and commonly used to treat children. Many of the syrup samples also exhibited leakage and contaminating particles.

A majority of samples of another popular antimalarial drug (sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine) failed basic disintegration tests, according to the PQM. More costly (and expensive) artemisinin-based therapies, the only class which has no major emerging resistance problem, did however pass the basic tests. The study did not examine how many of the samples were counterfeit.

Liberia was assisted in drawing up the LMHRA by the Promoting the Quality of Medicines (PQM) programme, an initiative set up by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US Pharmacopeial Convention (USP).

"We celebrate this important milestone in the history of the pharmaceutical sector of our country," said Reverend Tijli Tarty Tyee, the country's chief pharmacist.

"We believe that the implementation [of this Act] will be the most important aspect of the law that can ensure the protection of the citizens within our borders."