Emergency birth control pill, Postinor 2 scarcity hits pharmacies

For some women, this holiday season may be one full of anxiety because something could be missing from their list of essential items.

For those of them who have visited their usual pharmacies recently, they would have noticed that Postinor 2, a popular contraceptive pill among women, is currently scarce in Nigeria. The pill, which is usually sold in pharmaceutical stores around the country, is virtually unavailable now.

A BusinessDay survey of well-known pharmaceutical stores in Lagos indicated that the drug is simply not available and that this has led to a steep rise in its price, where it exists. Among the drug stores visited are: HealthPlus Limited, Nigeria’s first Integrative Pharmacy, Juli Pharmacy Plc, a retail healthcare service centre, and Care Forte Pharmacy, a medical drug store.

Tomisi Akinyemi, a pharmacist at HealthPlus Limited, explained that Postinor 2 has been scarce for a month now. “It is not even in the market currently,” he told BusinessDay. “People are hiking the price because it is scarce and the demand for it is high. I know that a lot of pharmacies do not have it.”

Akinyemi explained that Postinor 2 is the only contractive pill that is scarce at the moment, and that as a result, the price has risen by 80 percent within two week, to N900 from N500.

NPS MEDICINEWISE, an independent peer-reviewed journal providing critical commentary on drugs and therapeutics, says that Postinor-2 is an emergency contraceptive containing levonorgestrel, a hormonal medication which is used in a number of birth control methods. It is not intended as a regular method of contraception. It is used to prevent pregnancies when taken within 72 hours of unprotected sexual intercourse.

It is estimated that the pill prevents 85 percent of expected pregnancies. 95 percent of expected pregnancies will be prevented if taken within the first 24 hours, declining to 58 percent if taken between 48 hours and 72 hours after unprotected intercourse.

A pharmacist who wishes not to be identified said that the pill, being an emergency pill, is not meant to be scarce at the moment, especially in this festive period.

“This pill is quite popular than the other contractive pills and this will give room for a lot of fake drugs to be produced,” he said.

Women react to price increase

Tolu Esan, a student of University of Lagos, fears that unwanted pregnancies and abortions will be on the rise.

Medical experts say the scarcity should be rectified urgently. “A lot of single women prefer it and even the married ones use it as their own form of family planning than the regular ones. It is not a very good situation to have at the moment,” Oluniyi Olatunde, a medical doctor at Isolo General Hospital, said to BusinessDay by phone.

Like Esan, Olatunde believes that there could be a lot of unwanted pregnancies which bring health challenges for the country. “Teenage pregnancies are going to be on the rise in this period,” he warned. Nigeria will face a challenge controlling its population and that will be a problem meeting our target of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), he added.

Family planning is one aspect of the targets around universal access to sexual and reproductive health found in the SDGs.

In 2012, there were reports that the Federal government planned to ban Postinor 2, because of its side effects which are nausea, abdominal pains, fatigue, breast tenderness, dizziness, headaches, and in the most grievous of cases, a temporal imbalance of a woman’s menstrual circle.

Bunmi Bailey