Five years after its operations were re-sited from Kingston to temporary premises inside the University of Guyana’s Turkeyen Campus, the Government Analyst Food and Drug Department of the Ministry of Health is to be given a permanent home close to the university campus.
Stabroek Business has learnt that the key local institution for the scientific testing and certification of foods and medicines is to be housed in a new complex that will be equipped with laboratories and other requisites. However, Food and Drug Director Marlon Cole refused to be drawn on the precise location of the facility or even a time line for its commencement and conclusion.
Cole did say, however, that the creation of the new facility was part of a broader initiative to significantly enhance the quality of the services being offered by the department, including the filling of long-standing vacant positions, a limitation that inhibits the department in some of its more important functions.
Cole told Stabroek Business that the closure of the laboratory facility at Kingston in the wake of the resiting of the department and the setting up of a limited one at Turkeyen had significantly reduced the testing capacity of the department. He said whereas the Kingston laboratory facility had delivered 85 per cent of the testing requirements of the department under its mandate the present facility was only delivering 35 to 40 per cent of what was required.
The Food and Drugs Department plays a pivotal role in testing both foods and medicines in the matter of their fitness for human use and is heavily relied upon by both the public and private sectors.
The new laboratories will be certified by the Guyana National Bureau of Standards.
Crucially, an expanded Food and Drug Department will also enable more effective scrutiny of ports with a view to reducing what sources say were worrying volumes of counterfeit and sub- standard products. These developments had triggered calls from local distributors for the authorities to read the riot act that includes clamping down on the vending of fake detergents and canned and bottled foods, a practice that has long been commonplace outside municipal markets, and the prosecution of offenders.
Cole had told Stabroek Business during an earlier interview that staffing limitations were a key factor limiting the ability of the department to monitor and suppress the sale of illegal imports. He also told this newspaper that tampering with expiry dates was also an issue with which the department was concerned.
Meanwhile, Cole said that while the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the United States 2010 legislation that provides its Food and Drug Administration with sweeping powers to protect consumers against consumption of foods the might be dangerous to their health, had already gone into effect, the legislation had not yet, as far as he was aware, impacted on local exporters. Cole had said in a previous interview that the local food production sector was still some distance away from satisfying the requirements of the FSMA and the department would do everything in its power to help businesses satisfy those requirements.
