Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, Director-General, National Agency for Food, Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC) says the Coronavirus pandemic will give birth to so many indigenous pharmaceutical companies in the country.
Adeyeye said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday in Abuja.
The director-general said that God had endowed Nigeria with abundant resources to turn the crisis into great opportunity by manufacturing raw materials for productions of drugs.
“One thing that will come out of COVID-19 is that companies will start manufacturing pharmaceutical ingredients, even if it is one or two.
“Let us start something instead of importing everything; let us invest in our country.
“I am very confident of that because God gave us brains. We go out of this country and most of us in diaspora become stars in different fields,” she said.
Adeyeye emphasised that God had given Nigerians the best brains to transform the country in all the sectors of the economy.
“All we need is to focus on the areas of priority. If the government does not focus on education, instructing the university lecturers to prioritise research and development, we may not achieve drug security.
“Also, we need to address the issue of incessant strikes; I am not saying that some of the reasons of going on strike are not genuine, but that is not the way to solve our problems.
“I was a professor for 30 years, in the USA where I worked, it is strange to be on strike.
“We take planning seriously, so that is the reason why if we want to get there, we have to change our ways,’’ she said.
According to her, Nigeria needs to change its ways and have good development policies.
“China has a policy on family planning but here we don’t want to restrict the number of children we have; we keep talking about our grandchildren having so many children but they are all farmers.’’
Adeyeye said that NAFDAC had received applications from people seeking to register their facemasks producing outfits and would treat the applications to support local content.
“We are now testing them in the laboratory to see how safe and thick they are.
“The quality of the materials will determine if it is safe to stop your droplets from getting to somebody else; it is the thickness that matters.
“The quality of the material determines whether is safe or not,’’ she said.
According to her, the important aspect of facemask is that it must protect the user from getting droplets out or inhaling any.
“So, it is the thickness that matters for the general population. The thickness should stop droplets from getting out of the user’s system.
“Also, the materials should be soft enough not to irritate the user,” she said.
