The Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) needs more resources, according to a recommendation from the Parliamentary Select Committee on Health, in order to improve its ability to certify vaccines for use in Ghana and the surrounding area.
According to the committee, the authority would need to reach Maturity Level 4 in the World Health Organization (WHO) classification before it could authorise vaccinations.
Following a private meeting with the FDA management, the committee's chairman, Dr. Nana Yaw Afriyie, spoke with the media in Accra. "This also demands that the authority sets up a molecular laboratory and that is going to be so expensive to maintain because it is an eagle-eye facility by the WHO and this is where the FDA needs a lot of resources," he said.
WHO rating
Ghana and Tanzania are the two nations in Africa that currently hold a level three status according to the WHO.
There are four categories for categorising regulatory systems, with level one corresponding to the most basic regulatory system and level four to the most sophisticated.
Level three denotes that the system is fully integrated and working well, ensuring stable performance.
Resources
"We visited the FDA, and we were happy with how it operated. The FDA in Ghana is one of the best in Africa, and despite having few resources, it is succeeding.
"However, it has a number of problems that need to be solved. We anticipate that the authority will have the necessary resources to be able to authorise the use of vaccinations throughout Ghana and the surrounding area, he continued.
He further encouraged the government to avoid using the authority's domestically produced funds as a cash cow and stealing from them, claiming that this was impeding the authority from carrying out its duties properly.
According to Dr. Afriyie, the FDA should be examining roughly 10,000 institutions every year but only 7,200 are presently being done.
Therefore, around 2,000 institutions are not being investigated, and Dr. Afriyie emphasised that this is not the authority's responsibility because of resource limitations.
He stated that the committee was eager to meet with the Ministries of Finance and Health to discuss how crucial it was that the FDA not be regarded as a cash cow.
He asserted that the FDA now needed a lot more funding to uphold its requirements. If not, he claimed, there would be several problems with the nation's food supply.
Because it needs to pass several tests and FDA is understaffed, the nation is now unable to export palm oil to Europe, according to Dr. Afriyie.
"Some of these difficulties, which appear to be shameful, will be avoided when it is allowed the free room," he continued.
Lack of planning
The FDA's efficiency, according to committee ranking member Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, is primarily responsible for the nation's food supply being safe.
He pointed out that the authority's efficacy was being hampered by a lack of many logistical resources, such as trucks to conduct inspections.
"At the moment, the equipment at the port that is used to assess the safety of the foods being brought into the nation is damaged. Therefore, they must now transport samples from the port to the headquarters for testing before returning the results to the port.