by Godwin Isenyo
Some medical experts who converged on Kaduna were stunned following disclosure that free anti-malaria drugs meant for Nigeria were being sold at exorbitant prices at the Nigeria/Benin Republic border.
Senior Country Technical Coordinator, Malaria Consortium, Dr. Olusola Oresanya, disclosed this at the one-day dissemination meeting on Support for National Malaria Programme Phase II, with civil society organisations partnering with government, held in Kaduna on Monday.
Oresanya said that no one could say for sure how the anti-malaria drugs that were meant to be free found their way to the neighbouring country.
She said it took painstaking efforts to unravel the circumstances that led to the uncovering of the unwholesome act across the Nigeria and Benin Republic border.
According to Oresanya, in order to monitor the illegal movement of the antimalarial drugs, an electronic database has been set up to check both the distribution of drugs and the treatment of malaria cases across the country.
She said, “The free anti-malaria drugs meant for Nigeria are sold at exorbitant rates at the border of Benin Republic.
“Those malaria commodities were found outside the borders, but that has been a while ago and nobody knows how they got there. But they were found to be commodities that were supposed to be free of charge but they were being sold at the Benin Republic borders.
“So, that was the report that came back and after that, there were some interventions that were instituted in order to arrest the situation.
“And there has been a lot of monitoring being put in place, especially by the Global Fund, because a lot of the commodities that we use in treating malaria in the country in a number of states in Nigeria are funded by Global Fund.”
The state Commissioner of Health, Dr. Amina Baloni Mohammed, had earlier said that the treatment of malaria was free across the 23 local government areas of the state.
