The Federal Executive Council on Wednesday approved a memo on a bill to establish Council for Traditional, Alternative and Complementary Medicine Practice.
The Minister of Health, Osagie Ehanire, announced this after the 20th virtual FEC meeting chaired by President Muhammadu Buhari.
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Ehanire said the bill would provide an opportunity for those engaging in traditional medicine to raise standard and be regulated.
He said: “The outbreak of COVID-19 has renewed the call for home-grown solutions to all these public health diseases and to find the value in our traditional medicines and this is an opportunity with which traditional medicine’s practice can, not only upscale, but also regulate because there are also areas of malpractice that should be checked.
“It will also provide for the possibility of trainings, setting up institutions and also being able to research further, working with the Institute of Pharmaceutical Research of Nigeria to actually dig out the values that are in our traditional medicines, where they can be used and be used for research.
“There’s also conversation about protecting the intellectual property rights of who know these medicines. My attention was drawn to the fact that property rights are not so easily protected the way we define them, they are defined differently, but the protection of traditional knowledge is something that can also be established, on which we are going to be discussing with the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment, to protect the knowledge that has been accumulated over several generations, which is in the custody of traditional practitioners.
“By and large, this is a memo that meets a lot of demands and serves a lot of purposes.”
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