By Stella Kabruk
The National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), says it has started surveillance visits to cold rooms, pharmaceutical stores across Kaduna state.
The agency’s Chief Regulatory Officer, North-West zone, Mrs Falinyi Benjamin, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday in Kaduna.
Benjamin said that the visit is to ascertain the level of compliance on laid down guidelines of the agency regarding the operations of cold rooms and pharmaceutical stores.
“The visit is to ensure that they are maintaining good storage practices especially with the recent outage of power in the North, especially as regards temperature control,’’ she said.
Benjamin said that so far, all the facilities visited that engaged in the distribution of frozen items or required cold storage are operating in accordance with good storage and distribution practices.
“We have visited the state primary healthcare cold room, Kaduna North cold room, Narayi and Zakari ISA cold rooms and they have solar panels, and their temperature is within the range of between 2 and 8 degrees.
“Those engaged in frozen foods like seafood, fish, chicken etc have also complied with good storage practices and also have backup sources of power supply,’’ she said.
She said the food items, drugs, vaccines and other antigens were in a proper storage condition.
Benjamin assured continuous monitoring by the agency to ensure compliance to laid down guidelines, standards and operating procedures with particular emphasis on Good Hygiene Practices (GHP).
She also advised operators to ensure that various categories of products, particularly food items, drugs and vaccines were stored according to distribution guidelines.
“It is not just putting all gadgets in place but ensuring the thermometer that will show the equipment they are using is in the right storage condition in the morning and evening.
“We want the consumers to be served with appropriate food items that are stored according to health practices in order to rule out some of the health challenges that will come up when such products are consumed,’’ she advised. (NAN)
