Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof. Moji Adeyeye
By Tony Adibe
The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has advised journalists and entertainers in the Southeast Zone of Nigeria to join the agency in its current war against use of bleaching cream.
The Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof. Moji Adeyeye, gave the advice on Wednesday in Enugu during an address at the South-East Media Sensitisation Workshop on Dangers of Bleaching Creams and Regulatory Controls.
The workshop witnessed paper presentation of various papers on: “An Overview of Skin Bleaching: The NAFDAC Perspective,” “Role of Mass Media in Promoting Public Health in Nigeria,” “Safe Handling of Chemicals and Ingredients in the Cosmetics Industry” , “The Cosmovigillance Best Practices” and others.
Represented by Dr Leonard Omokpariola, Director of Chemical Evaluation and Research, Prof. Adeyeye said that it was necessary to warn people of South-East and Nigerians in general to the harmful effects of bleaching creams including cancer and damage to organs.
Other dangers included skin irritation and allergy, skin burn and rashes, wrinkles, premature skin ageing and prolonged healing of wounds, according to the D-G of NAFDAC.
Prof. Adeyeye said: “Last year, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Mr Boss Mustapha, acting on the resolutions of the Senate wrote to NAFDAC stressing the need to take stringent regulatory actions to stem the dangerous tide of rampant and pervasive cases of Nigerians using bleaching creams.
“We immediately took some decisive steps such as sensitisation of the public through different media outlets, enforcement through intelligence and raids in trade fair complexes that have resulted in large seizures and destruction of violative products.
“One of such sensitisation actions was the flag-off of Media Sensitization Workshops organised for journalists in Abuja, Lagos, Kano, Ibadan, Port-Harcourt and today in Enugu. Today’s sensitisation workshop is therefore a fulfilment of my promise to cascade it to the six geo-political zones in the country.
“This is a deliberate strategy of mobilising, educating, sensitising, and challenging Nigerian Health Journalists to play a frontline role in our concerted efforts to eradicate the menace of bleaching creams and needless waste of scarce resources in Nigeria.”
According to her, the sensitization workshop is a training the trainers’ programme with the great expectation that participants would assume the role of champions in the vanguard of the campaign against use of bleaching creams.
She said that a World Health Organization (WHO, 2018) study revealed that use of skin bleaching creams was prevalent among 77 per cent of Nigerian women which was highest in Africa compared to 59 per cent in Togo, 35 per cent in South Africa and 27 per cent women in Senegal.
She said: “This scary statistic has shown that the menace of bleaching creams in Nigeria has become a national health emergency that requires a multi-faced regulatory approach. Part of the multi-pronged approach is consultative/sensitisation meetings such as this and heightened raids on distribution outlets of bleaching creams.”
In an address, the Enugu State Commissioner for Health, Dr Ikechukwu Obi, said that the state government and her institutions would continue to collaborate with NAFDAC in its mandate to safeguard the health of the nation.
Obi, who was presented by the Director of Pharmaceutical Services, Mr. Monday Obetta, said: “We want our people to join hands with NAFDAC to protect the skin, which is an important organ, protecting other organs in the body”.
Also in his remark, Director of Public Affair in NAFDAC, Dr. Abubakar Jimoh said that NAFDAC “wants to use human face to tackle the menace of bleaching cream” by engaging the media practitioners in order to get Nigerians rightly informed against bleaching cream.
Dr Jimoh said that the agency wanted individual Nigerians, who are in the demand side of bleaching cream, to know the serious danger and negative consequences of using bleaching cream.
“We thank the media for their sustained support all these years; however, we want media practitioners to do more for us in this era of war against bleaching cream nationwide,” he said.
The President, Association of Nigeria Health Journalists, Mr Hassan Zaggi, advised health journalists to put the advocacy against use of bleaching creams to the front burner of media discourse and engineering public thoughts toward it.
“Media practitioners should do more by creating time to talk one-on-one to people around them on the dangers of bleaching cream,” Zaggi said.
