Pres Ali reinforces importance of stronger Food and Drug surveillance, monitoring

President Dr Irfaan Ali has underscored the need for stronger surveillance, monitoring, and testing systems within Guyana’s food safety framework, as the Government moves to enhance oversight of food products available in supermarkets and markets nationwide. The Head of State made the remarks during a meeting with the leadership and staff of the Government Analyst-Food and Drug Department (GA-FDD), alongside Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony and Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha. According to the President, the strengthened systems are intended to ensure that all food products meet required standards for quality, safety, labelling, product description and nutritional content. Following the engagement, Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony outlined several areas in which the Government is seeking to improve the country’s food safety architecture, including laboratory capacity, staffing, and inter-ministerial coordination. Anthony said the Health Ministry and the Agriculture Ministry will be working together to strengthen oversight mechanisms across the sector. “The Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Agriculture will be collaborating closely to ensure that these things are closely monitored,” Dr Anthony said. He further stated that improvements are needed in laboratory systems to expand the range and volume of food testing being conducted. “We need to improve the capacity to do laboratory testing of different items of food to make sure they are valid and so forth,” he noted.

Improvements, upgrades
Responding to questions on whether the planned improvements involve infrastructure upgrades or human resource development, the Health Minister said both areas are being targeted. “All of it because we have to get the labs to be able to do more testing. We need to have additional people who would be able to do the testing and so forth,” he said. Anthony also pointed to ongoing legislative and institutional changes that are reshaping responsibility for food safety regulation between Ministries. He further explained that responsibility for food regulation has shifted between ministries under updated legal provisions. “Right now, there’s legislation that allows food to go to the Ministry of Agriculture. So that’s what we are working on to make sure that they have all the capacity there. Previously food [and Drug Department] was under the Ministry of Health but with new legislation it’s being transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture,” Anthony explained.

Disconnect
In April, while addressing the 70th Annual Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) Health Research Conference at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, President Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali spoke about the disconnect between health innovation and regulatory frameworks. He was at the time making reference to the fact that the GA-FDD in Guyana is working on approving the use of Mounjaro, a once-weekly, self-injectable medication for managing Type 2 diabetes and chronic weight management in adults. According to President Ali, while “everybody is using it”, regulatory authorities are still working on approving the drug.
“Health innovation is advancing at a pace that far exceeds the ability of many regulatory systems to assess, approve, and monitor. I’ll give you a simple example. I spoke to our Minister of Health recently. Our regulators at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are still trying to approve Mounjaro, and everybody is [already] using it,” he had said. “If the solution runs too far ahead of the regulator because of their ineffectiveness, or the ineffectiveness of the system to respond quickly, then the population will be ahead of you. The population will be ahead of you, and that is the complete collapse of a healthcare system,” the President had outlined.