ST. Racheal’s Pharmaceutical, a local drug company, has launched its antimalarial brand – ‘ST.Racheal’s Artemether 80mg + Lumefantrine 480mg 1×6 Tablets’ in Lagos.
Akinjide Adeosun, the chairman/CEO of ST. Racheal’s Pharmaceutical, at the product launch, which coincided with the company’s third anniversary, said the new brand will give patients and healthcare professionals ‘peace of mind.’
The company which has gone from a zero base brand in 2018 to having seven NAFDAC registered antibiotics brands and has now added an antimalarial product, said that the antimalarial drug would deliver its promise of top-quality, at affordable cost, in tandem with the mission of improving life expectancy in the country.
He said the launch of the antimalarial drug was the company’s contribution to wage war against malaria, thereby reducing its menace of high morbidity and mortality of malaria.
ST. Racheal’s Pharmaceutical malaria brand joins dozens of Artemether and lumefantrine medicine mix in the Nigerian market. The combination of Artemether and lumefantrine interfere with the growth of parasites in the red blood cells of the human body after they are introduced through mosquito bites.
The prevalence of substandard malaria drugs creates the need for top-quality products. According to a 2016 USAID report, an analysis of the medicine samples collected between 2003 and 2013 that were listed in the Medicines Quality Database (MQDB) found that 56.4 percent of all failed samples (i.e., products considered substandard, counterfeit, expired, or
those which failed the visual inspection) were antimalarials, which accounted for 6.5 percent of the failure rate, when calculated in proportion to the number of antimalarials sampled.
Antimalarials also represented 52.5 percent of all substandard medicines and 92.6 percent of all counterfeit medicines, the report said.
While drugs have helped to control the diseases, Adeosun said that there was also a need to ensure the mechanical control of mosquitoes through the construction of permanent drains in swamps, and followed by indoor spraying with pesticides.
According to the World Health Organisation, in 2019, there were an estimated 229 million cases of malaria worldwide and malaria deaths stood at 409 000 with Africa accounting for 94 percent of cases and deaths.
Adeosun said malaria can be eradicated in Nigeria through adequate and consistent budgeting for its treatment and elimination programmes, as was done in El-Salvador, Paraguay, Argentina, Algeria, Mauritius, Lesotho, and Seychelles, supported by the mobilisation of health workers to tackle the diseases in strategic areas.
Citing the latest WHO data, he said that malaria afflicted over 60million Nigerians yearly killing over 95, 418 in 2019.
The coronavirus pandemic has shifted the focus away from malaria even though it remained just as menacing before the virus
Wellington Oyibo, a consultant medical parasitologist, and head, ANDI Centre of Excellence for Malaria Diagnosis, College of Medicine, University of Lagos, Idi-Araba said the neglect of malaria interventions in the COVID-19 pandemic will escalate the malaria situation.
“Uncomplicated malaria cases could progress quickly to complicated and that could be fatal; critical attention is required to address this.
“Severe malaria-related death is as traumatic as COVID-19 and children die early when supportive management is not accessible,’’ he said.
Oyibo urged the Federal Government to support indigenous manufacturers of malaria drugs, saying, “malaria is preventable, treatable and access to quality-assured commodities including diagnostics, medicines, LLINs, should be accelerated.’’
Babatunde Ajayi, a special assistant on Health to the Lagos State Governor; said that over 50 percent of Nigerians get malaria at least once a year.
According to him, 20 per cent of hospitals visit are due to malaria and 10 percent of the overall disease burden is from malaria.
The economic burden from malaria is huge. According to the US centers for disease control, direct costs from malaria (for example, illness, treatment, premature death) have been estimated to be at least US$ 12 billion per year.
“At the end of the day, the economic burden from malaria is huge,’’ Ajayi said.
