National Drug Authority explains why they didn’t tell public farmers were feeding ARVs to animals despite being aware

The National Drug Authority has informed Parliament’s HIV Committee that although they had known about farmers feeding & treating their animals with ARVs, the matter wasn’t made public for fear of raising alarm & impacting Uganda’s economic earning from animal exports abroad.

Jenifer Alanyo (UPDF Rep) castigated NDA for concealing such information from the public & also rejected arguments fronted by NDA that when some drugs are consumed by animals, their effects on human life is minimized during the cooking, saying experts from Makerere University revealed that the heating of drugs increases their toxicity .

“You earlier on said that NDA knew about the presence of ARVs in chicken and pigs in 2013/2014 and when you knew about this, you clearly said you didn’t want to alarm the country, did you think at any one point that this would come out and did you think about the community and citizens of this country in regard to the effects of this drug?” Alanyo questioned.

Amos Atumanya from.NDA warned that consuming animals fed on ARVs drugs might contribute to the development of resistant viral strains in naïve persons due to exposure to suboptimal doses of ARVs in food and may also lead to the unintended consumption of these drugs which may have unforeseen health consequences for humans such as adverse drug reactions including hypersensitivity.