Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, assuring the safety of lives through the intake of quality medicines is a major responsibility of governments all over the world. The Ministry of Health and Sanitation has the mandate to provide appropriate, affordable, and quality health care services to all in Sierra Leone, a mandate we take very seriously.

National drug expenditure as a proportion of total health expenditure currently ranges from 7% to 66% worldwide.  The government of Sierra Leone provides an average of ten billion Leone’s of its annual budget for the procurement of medicines and medical supplies. The government willingly spends this amount of money on medicines because of the role medicines can play in saving lives, restoring health, preventing diseases and stopping epidemics. Therefore, the medicines must be safe, effective and of good quality. Controlling the quality of medicines before and after a marketing authorization has been issued is critical for ensuring their quality and safety.

The capacity of a Medicines Regulatory Agency such as the Pharmacy Board of Sierra Leone to undertake medicines quality assurance is directly related to the operational capability of its surveillance system, and especially the associated quality control laboratory.  The results of laboratory assessment of samples of marketed medicines enable the Pharmacy Board to evaluate the actual quality of products used in the country and to identify any problem areas.  This is even more important considering that there are no local manufacturers of pharmaceutical products in Sierra Leone.  This implies that we depend one hundred percent on medicines imported from other countries..

After the enactment by an Act of Parliament of the Pharmacy and Drugs Act of 1988, the Pharmacy Board of Sierra Leone became operational in 1996. the Act mandated the Pharmacy Board to regulate not only the practice of Pharmacy, but also to be responsible for the regulatory control of the manufacture, import, distribution, sale and use of pharmaceuticals and other related products, to ensure that medicines are safe, efficacious and of good quality.

The Pharmacy Board established the present National Pharmaceutical Quality Control Laboratory in 1996.  Because of inadequate financial infrastructural and logistical support, the Laboratory was temporarily established within the National Public Health Laboratory of the Ministry of Health, which was located at the Connaught Hospital, the National Referral Hospital.  The laboratory started with equipment provided by the government of Sierra Leone at the same time made use of some of the equipment and instruments from the Public Health Laboratory.

Since its inception, the Pharmacy Board has supported this Quality Control Laboratory and has also been providing professional staff to oversee its operations.  The initial plan was to develop it to a WHO Level II laboratory, but this was realized at that time, due to non-availability of financial resources and technical expertise.

Thus, as part of the efforts to medicines quality assurance system, my Ministry included the upgrading of the Drug Regulatory Authority and its component Quality Control Laboratory in the GOSL/ADB/Health Services Rehabilitation Project (HSRP). It was initially planned that the laboratory was to be upgraded in its previous location (Connaught Hospital), but it became evident at the beginning of the project that the section of the building where the laboratory was located would be demolished and was therefore relocated to its current temporary premises here at the Jenner Wright Health Centre there are plans to construct a new laboratory in the enviro9ns of the Central Medical Stores under a European Union funded project.

The Laboratory has a number of separate rooms.  This includes a small administrative office, a two-room physio-chemical unit, two instrumentation rooms, and a store equipped with an extractor fan.  All the Laboratory rooms are supplied with running water and drainage, electric power from a stand-by generator and air-conditioning.  There is an overhead water tank for the storage of water.  All the units have adequate electrical outlets and voltage stabilizing equipment and are also provided with storage cabinets and drawers for reagents, glassware etc. shelves have been provided for keeping reference books and working notebooks.  The upgrading of the Laboratory included rehabilitation of the Laboratory, procurement of Laboratory equipment and supplies, and the training of laboratory staff.

In the Training Component, four staff were trained in pharmaceutical analysis, two in equipment maintenance, and one in laboratory Management, all in South Africa.

Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency, distinguished ladies and gentlemen as it is now obvious, this was more than just infrastructural rehabilitation.  The Project considered all the support structures that would make the Laboratory effective.

During an official trip abroad a few months ago, the Registrar of the Pharmacy Board made an appeal for assistance to Pfizer Pharmaceutical Incorporation through Dr. Patrick Lukulay, a Sierra Leonean working as Chief Scientist for Pfizer to donate laboratory equipment to our National Pharmaceutical Quality Control Laboratory to complement what government has provided.

We are extremely grateful to Dr. Patrick Lukulay for his effort in making the case to Pfizer for the donation of highly sophisticated, state of the art, analytical equipments worth approximately four hundred thousand US dollars.  This equipment was channeled through a Sierra Leone NGO, “Saving Lives Through Alternate Options (SLAO) in Houston, in the United States of America which is headed by a Sierra Leonean lady, Ms. Judith Momoh.

We are also grateful to the under mentioned persons and organizations for their role in the above mentioned donation.

1.         Rachel Seligson

            Pfizer Incorporated

            Manager, Pfizer Philanthropy

            USA and

2.         D.J. Boehm

            Associate Director

            Pfizer Inc.

            USA

Who donated the HPLC equipments on behalf of Pfizer

3.         Anthony Barricelli

            Manager

            Pfizer Inc.

            USA

Who donated the computers on behalf of Pfizer,

4.         Alessandro Baldi

            Perkin Elmer Corporation

            Perkin Elmer Life and Analytical Sciences

            USA

Who donated the Total Chrom soft waveform the HPLC systems on behalf of Perkin Elmer, and who forwarded the donated equipments to Sierra Leone on behalf of Pfizer Incorporated.

We commend the European Union HSSP for their great support to the Pharmacy Board in general and the laboratory in particular.  For the past year, they have provided fuel for the running of the standby generator thereby ensuring constant electricity at the Laboratory, provision of stationery and cleaning materials.

Our gratitude also goes to the Chief Executive and staff of the Food and Drugs Board, Ghana, with special mention of Rev. J. Martey and Mr. Eric Karikari Boateng of the laboratory Unit) for their moral and technical support.

We hope other organizations and well meaning Sierra Leoneans at home and abroad will follow the example of these donors.

I implore those involved in the business, of pharmacy to make good use of the laboratory, which is a national asset, as a means of ensuring that all products imported into Sierra Leone meet the required standards.

With the current strides that the Pharmacy Board is making, I can envisage in the near future an expansion of the Laboratory to include testing of cosmetics, medical devices and condoms, and the addition of a microbiology unit for sterility testing of antimicrobials.  It can even provide analytical services to neighboring countries.

As I speak pictures of this laboratory has been put on the official website of the Ministry of Health and Sanitation so that people around the world can view them.  The purpose of this is to portray the achievements of this government to the world at large,.

In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency, let me use this opportunity to thank all those who participated in the early stages of this project; I want to express my sincere thanks to W.H.O. who provided technical assistance for the pharmaceutical and training components, the local consultants, who worked very hard to ensure we got value for money from our international consultants, and finally the members of the Pharmacy board for their patriotic service.

Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency, and our honored guests I thank you for your attention.