Herbal medicine set for regulation

Kenya is working on guidelines to regulate operations of herbalists who are partly blamed for increasing the sale of counterfeit medicines by passing them as herbal to patients.

“The regulations will require that herbalists register their medicines and that those medicines have to go for laboratory analysis,” said Edward Abwao, assistant chief pharmacist at the Pharmacy and Poisons Board that regulates sale of medicines. The regulations will be issued in November.

“We have discovered that some herbalists are mixing concoctions of conventional medicines and passing them as herbal medicines. The active ingredients in such medicines are way above what is recommended and give instant impact to patients making them believe they are genuine,” said Abwao.

He cited the sexual enhancement drugs and those used to improve the body’s immunity as most targeted.

Sale of herbal medicine in Kenya is not regulated. Herbalists do not require any special education skills to be licensed by the Department of Culture Services.

This oversight has seen proliferation of herbalists of questionable backgrounds.

“These medicines are causing deaths, in particular those using them to manage diabetic conditions,” said Ephraim Kanake, the chairman of the Consumers Federation of Kenya.

The World Health Organisation estimates that at least 80 per cent of Kenyans have used herbal medicine at least once.

One of the major consequences of unregulated herbal industry was noted last year when the Pharmacy and Poisons Board of Kenya issued an alert that women were being sold a fake herbal contraceptive that makes their children develop adolescent features, including the start of menstrual cycle in three-year-old girls.

Seven women and six children had then been admitted to the Kenyatta National Hospital and had been diagnosed with the side effects of the drug.

Chief Pharmacist Kipkerich Koskei said the board has all along related with herbalists on the basis of “trust,” on the assumption that the products they have been selling to Kenyans are effective, but new trends indicate this is not the case and must change.

“We have realised now that we are dealing with crooked herbalists and we are going to act,” he said.

While some herbalists have welcomed regulation to weed out rogue practitioners, they have been reluctant to divulge the content and effectiveness of their medicines, fearing intellectual property theft.

James Kamwangi, a herbalist operating near the populous Machakos Bus Station in downtown Nairobi, said herbalists have no way of knowing when their formula for medicines is stolen to benefit other people.  

“If the government could assure us on this issue and allow us to patent our formulas, then we shall agree to give out the ingredients we use,” he said.

The ingredients currently used by most herbalists are a matter of guess because they have no machines to test the content of the herbs they recommend to patients.

Most depend on unwritten knowledge passed to them by their mentors, mostly elderly or departed relatives who did the trade in earlier days.

In 2008, the International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property singled out Kenya as one of the countries without proper intellectual property laws to encourage communities to share traditional knowledge.

The group recommended that development of laws and policies for the protection of traditional knowledge like herbal medicine must be undertaken in consultation with the communities that hold them.

Medical practitioners and researchers involved in chemical analysis of traditional medicine at the University of Nairobi and Kenya Medical Research Institute say time is running out and the country needs a traditional medicine policy immediately.