Day NAFDAC Took Campaign Against Skin Bleaching To PH

The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has urged journalists, supermarket and retail outlets within the South-South to join the agency in its war against use of bleaching, and whitening cream.
The Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof. Moji Adeyeye, made the call early in the week at Port Harcourt in an address at the South-South Media Sensitisation Workshop on Dangers of Bleaching Creams and Regulatory Controls.
Adeyeye, who spoke through Zonal Director, Chike Obiano noted that there was an imperative to warn people in the South-South and Nigerians in general about the harmful effects of bleaching creams and the dangers they pose to health.
According to her, some of the dangers include skin irritation and allergy, skin burn and rashes, wrinkles, premature skin ageing and prolonged healing of wounds.
Last year, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Mr Boss Mustapha, acting on the resolutions of the Senate wrote to NAFDAC stressing the need to take stringent regulatory actions to stem the dangerous tide of rampant and pervasive cases of Nigerians using bleaching creams.
“We immediately took some decisive steps such as sensitisation of the public through different media outlets, enforcement through intelligence and raids in trade fair complexes that have resulted in large seizures and destruction of volatile products”, she disclosed.
“One of such sensitisation actions was the flag-off of Media sensitisation workshops organised for journalists in Abuja, Lagos, Kano, Ibadan, Port-Harcourt and today in Enugu.
“Today’s sensitisation workshop is therefore a fulfilment of my promise to cascade it to the six geo-political zones in the country. This is a deliberate strategy of mobilising, educating, sensitising, and challenging Nigerian Health Journalists to play a frontline role in our concerted efforts to eradicate the menace of bleaching creams and needless waste of scarce resources in Nigeria,” she further said.
Adeyeye noted that the sensitisation workshop was a training the trainers’ programme with the great expectation that participants would assume the role of champions in the vanguard of the campaign against use of bleaching creams.
Statistics on the use of whitening creams across the globe by the World Health Organisation (WHO), 2018 study revealed that use of skin bleaching creams was prevalent among 77 per cent of Nigerian women which was highest in Africa compared to 59 per cent in Togo, 35 per cent in South Africa and 27 per cent women in Senegal.
This scary statistics according to her has become a national challenge hence a multi-pronged consultative/sensitisation meetings was organised along sides heightened raids on distribution outlets of bleaching creams,” she stated.
In her overview of “Skin Bleaching: The NAFDAC Perspective”, Mrs Anto Ebele, a deputy director in the agency explained that many people use skin whitening creams for social acceptance.
She explained that normally cosmetics are used to enhance appearance but not to damage nature as some women and men have shown these days.
The damage caused by bleaching goes beyond the physical appearance to even internal organs as the kidney.
Also Speaking, Director of Public Affairs in NAFDAC, Dr. Abubakar Jimoh, said the agency wanted to adopt a more humane approach in tacklinf the menace of bleaching cream by engaging the media practitioners in order to get Nigerians rightly informed against bleaching cream.
Jimoh noted that the agency wanted Nigerians, who use bleaching creams to know the dangers and negative consequences of using such cosmetics.
“We thank the media for their sustained support all these years; however, we want media practitioners to do more for us in this era of war against bleaching cream nationwide,” he said.
The President, Association of Nigeria Health Journalists, Mr Hassan Zaggi, urged health journalists to push the advocacy against the use of bleaching creams to the front burner of media discourse and engineering public thoughts toward it.
“Media practitioners should do more by creating time to talk one-on-one to people around them on the dangers of bleaching cream,” Zaggi said.
The workshop featured paper presentation on: “An Overview of Skin Bleaching: The NAFDAC Perspective”; “Role of Mass Media in Promoting Public Health in Nigeria”; “Safe Handling of Chemicals and Ingredients in the Cosmetics Industry” and “The Cosmovigillance Best Practices” among others.

By: Kevin Nengia