Five years ago M. B. Miigane, an MP in Hargeisa, described Somaliland as a dumping ground for expired medicines despite the establishment of an agency tasked with overseeing food and medicine quality. “Foreign NGOs have imported expired medicines” he said in a presentation to Somaliland MPs on the quality of food and medicines imported to Somaliland.
A commentator writing in oodweynenews.com has divulged secrets of some pharmacists who “urge their workers to sell medicines whose expiry date is not too far off”. He wrote: “ I saw expired medicines whose expiry dates have been changed”.
In 2009 a Unicef report on the pharmacies in Somaliland had this to say on the quality of medicines and compliance of pharmacists with good pharmaceutical practices:
“Over 400 essential drugs were examined and only one case of expired medicine was observed. It was not within the capacity of the survey to establish whether packaging had been tampered with or if drugs had been repackaged to reflect different expiry dates. However, there seemed to be a high level of attention paid to expiry dates overall, and the frequency with which pharmacies restock themselves is testament to caution in this regard.”
It is time to commission a new, independent study to assess the effectiveness of the agency established to protect the public against unscrupulous pharmacists and food importers.
Somaliland Development Bulletin
