ENUGU, South-East, Nigeria – National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, (NAFDAC), has urged journalists and entertainers within the South-East to join the agency in its current war against use of bleaching cream.

Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof. Moji Adeyeye, made the call on Wednesday in Enugu at the South-East Media Sensitization Workshop on Dangers of bleaching creams and Regulatory Controls.

Adeyeye, who was represented by the Agency’s Director of Chemical Evaluation and Research, Dr. Leonard Omokpariola, noted that there was an imperative to warn people of the region and Nigerians in general to the harmful effects of bleaching creams including cancer and damage to organs.

According to her, other dangers are skin irritation and allergy, skin burn and rashes, wrinkles, premature skin ageing and prolonged healing of wounds.

The NAFDAC DG added that 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 sensitization 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 violative products.

“One of such sensitization actions was the flag-off of Media Sensitization Workshops organised for journalists in Abuja, Lagos, Kano, Ibadan, Port-Harcourt and today in Enugu.

“Today’s sensitization workshop is therefore a fulfillment of my promise to cascade it to the six geo-political zones in the country.

“This is a deliberate strategy of mobilizing, educating, sensitizing, 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 said.

Adeyeye noted that the sensitization workshop is 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.

She said that a World Health Organization (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 statistic has shown that the menace of bleaching creams in Nigeria has become a national health emergency that requires a multi-faced regulatory approach.

“Part of the multi-pronged approach is consultative/sensitization meetings such as this and heightened raids on distribution outlets of bleaching creams,” she added.

In a goodwill message, Enugu State Commissioner for Health, Dr. Ikechukwu Obi, said the state government and its institutions would continue to collaborate with NAFDAC in its mandate to safeguard the health of the nation.

The Commissioner who was represented by the Director of Pharmaceutical Services, Mr. Monday Obetta, said: “We want our people to join hands with NAFDAC to protect the skin which is an important organ, protecting other organs in the body”

Also speaking, Director of Public Affair in NAFDAC, Dr. Abubakar Jimoh, said the agency wants to use human face to tackle the menace of bleaching cream by engaging the media practitioners in order to get Nigerians rightly informed against bleaching cream.

He noted that the agency wanted individual Nigerians, who are in the demand side of bleaching cream, to know the serious danger and negative consequences of using bleaching cream.

“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 put the advocacy against 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,” he 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.