The Deputy Minister for Health and Social Welfare, Dr Seif Rashid, made the revelation as he was launching a workshop on substandard, spurious, falsely labelled, falsified and counterfeit (SSFFC) medical products in Dar es Salaam.

Dr Seif said that substandard and counterfeit drugs are causing health hazards and sometimes loss of innocent lives that's why the government has made direct efforts in making sure it eradicates the problem.

"The government has tried to eradicate the problem and I can inform you that we have put in place strong medical regulatory framework backed by comprehensive legislation, human resources and regulatory infrastructure including a national drug quality control laboratory which is WHO prequalified," he told the congregation.

Dr Seif explained that despite efforts taken by the government, more initiatives are needed to make sure there are good ways of sharing information between the authorities dealing with the substandard and counterfeit medical products.

"New and innovative measures are needed to coordinate information sharing at regional and global level; this can put countries and laboratories close to each other in dealing with the same medical product," he said.

The Director General of Tanzania Food and Drugs Authority (TFDA), Mr Hiiti Sillo said that it was not an easy thing for WHO to choose Tanzania as the host of the trainings, saying that the country is among others that are in the front line fighting against the problem of falsified and counterfeit drugs.

"The workshop is prepared by WHO in Africa, the first one took place in Nigeria. There are 46 WHO-member states in Sub Saharan Africa; however, they chose Tanzania to be the host of the second training, this means they value the efforts of our government in fighting against counterfeit drugs," he said.

Mr Sillo noted that not only Tanzania will benefit from WHO trainings, but also other African countries as they will exchange ways to combat the problem and acquiring new system of sharing information about counterfeit and substandard medical products.

"About 16 Eastern and Southern African countries are participating in the workshop and I believe at the end of the meeting all countries will be enriched with different experiences on how to deal with SSFFC products," he said.

The WHO representative from Geneva, Mr Michael Deats, noted that there was no clear global picture on counterfeit and substandard medical products in the world, that's why they decided to conduct the workshop to teach the new system of sharing information among member states.

"The main purpose of the workshop is to introduce new system to share case studies and any other information about SSFFC in order to develop more systematic and structural manner to help regulations of the countries," he said.

The workshop will be conducted for three days and countries which are participating in the workshop include Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania mainland and Zanzibar, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.