Promotion of self-medication
The existence of these vendors has paved the way for self-medication as residents no longer see the need to go to hospitals for proper checkups.
For instance, a nursing mother took her two-year-old son with a high temperature to a nearby drug vendor for a checkup. On getting there, the vendor checked his eyeball and concluded that he had malaria without conducting a malaria test on him.
She was lucky that the child survived. A Lagos-based medical laboratory scientist, Mr Madubugwu Olisakwe, said such a situation could easily have led to death.
“Let us stop playing with our lives. Drug hawkers do not have the capacity to prescribe drugs or treat patients. Avoid them like a plague,” he said.
Accessibility to drugs is a major challenge
Dataphyte visited some pharmaceutical stores in Ogun State to find out how easy it was for these vendors to get drugs. Observation from these pharmaceutical stores showed that there was unlimited access to drugs in the pharmacies. People would walk into any pharmacy to buy any type of drugs, including prescription medicines, and they would get them.
Dataphyte was told by health experts that the vendors would go into pharmacy stores with their lists and would come out with the medicines they needed.