Incongruous Initiative!

Our public authorities are current in a high fighting spirit in the drive to clear our street of expired drugs and other poorly-handled and manufactured medications of dubious origins which pose a threat to the lives of citizens.

The presence of these drugs and their easy access paints a picture of adding salt to the injury of an excruciating ambient poverty which is making it very difficult for cash-strapped ordinary Cameroonians to access normal drugs. This probably explains why in many cases, these citizens have rather taken these live-saving measures as act of wickedness on the part of the public authorities because, in their reasoning, in the absence of viable initiatives to provide them even with a bare minimum, these drugs, even dangerous as they are, were their only safety route out of a difficult situation.

These initiatives by government will only have the desired impact when enough effort will be made, by way of replacement, to ensure that the required easy-to-reach drugs are made available. Otherwise all these noble initiatives with all their good intentions, will always come to naught as can be seen from the recurrent nature of the practice of flooding our streets with these drugs; to the extent that removing same from the public eye has become a cat-and-mouse game of sorts as government has never really succeeded in getting these drugs off our streets. Occasional destruction of same by burning in highly-publicised media outings are useful, but their impact in stemming the ill is still very limited and does not seem to be the best way out of the conundrum.

The exercise of destroying unhealthy medication took a new turn last week in a high profile event in Douala. This time the medicines destined for destruction were from public hospitals, the least of places from which one could expect wrong-doing in the dispatching or use of medicines.

The medicines destroyed on the orders of the Governor of the Littoral Region are said to be expired drugs identified in the various public health units in the city were in several tones. Quite an embarrassment for a health system badly in need of medication! This so because in an area fraught with corrupt practices such as the hospital milieu it was not possible for some irresponsible vice-ridden individuals to propose these dangerous medicines for sale to impoverished patients all too ready to pick up the bait.

Of even greater worry is the fact that these vital medicines were ever alloyed to get to their expiry phase, depriving patients, many of whom might have benefitted from the rare opportunity of obtaining medication free of charge. There are countless cases of what is generally referred to as social cases, that is, situations in which patients are objectively unable to pay for medical bills or unable to buy prescribed medications. One would have expected these drugs to serve in such situations and help the needy.

The destruction of these drugs has been hailed as a salutary initiative; but objectively it was an incongruous one because these medicines could have been used much earlier and for better purposes rather than waiting until they became totally unusable in a context where there is crying need and when ordinary citizens have an uphill task acceding to cheap medication even for very simple pathologies.