In manual labor, an artisan finishes the work on an item before starting the manufacturing on the next. The craft actually allows performing the tasks of manufacturing and control concomitantly. But this practice cannot be applied as such in industry, where, in the food or pharmaceutical industry for example, the rate may be thousands of units per day or per hour. In the activities indicated, and others, control operations are therefore separated from the production. As audit work is necessarily downstream, it ultimately determines the rate of flow of products manufactured in the circuits of trade. In this regard, if the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) system, the most flexible tool for quality control, has difficulty taking root in our African countries, this is because it assumes that there are enough of qualified engineers for its implementation what is far from being the case generally in the SMEs and SMIs considered. In this regard, it should be noted that the rules of the science and art of quality control in question are regularly reviewed and optimized by the industrial powers, for a long time already, so to perpetuate the divide that separates them from we the developing countries and emerging. The article takes a look at some methods used for this purpose.
Background
When looking carefully at the texts of the 13-83 Act, repealed in 2010, we realize that all the powers contained in that regulation have been put in the hands of certain officials of the Ministry of agriculture and virtually nothing in the hands of the Ministry of justice. In sum, when, in this regard, the court sent, the case may be, a fraudster in jail, it was only obeying the orders of services Fraud. In this regard, when, a few years ago, an industrial, that has a product (batches of frozen squid from South America) stuck in the port of Casablanca, asked the Court of First Instance to designate an expert witness for a second assessment, a judge refused the request and has rather required that the second expertise had to be performed by the same officials, those same people behind the blocking of its product in the first place. Indeed, the 13-83 Act states that the expertise and second assessment must be performed by the same services of authority against fraud although this contrasts with international regulations on the subject. As nothing is hidden in this microcosm, I learned later that the product in question was finally released after a phone call of the director of a foreign powerful Chamber of Commerce in Casablanca, one of whose members was related to the importation of the seafood product, with the Director of fraud services who “made the necessary to have the product being accepted”. In the same vein, a few years before, I was duly appointed by the same court for performing an audit and analysis work on the system of dialysis of a clinic whose owner, a female doctor, suspected her partner of sabotage. The complainant gave me a tour of the clinic near the hospital Averroes Casablanca and explanations needed to make me understand what was going on and I had to return the next day ready to carry out sampling of solutes for laboratory analysis. But later that same day I got a phone where she told me that the court overturned the award of expertise after the receiving of a phone call from the Morocco Association of physicians. Finally, the dispute must have been resolved in the headquarters of the association in question out of sight of justice. I could add other examples, but the conclusion remains the same: that such practices, according to my observations, were originally initiated by the French occupier who distrusted the Moroccan tribunal may be because this authority was against using the French as a working tool. But France needed, for the sake of its interests, to keep an eye on what is happening in the industrial and service activities in Morocco so to smooth the way for French business operators and the best approach to do it was via the meddling, one way or another, on quality control activities.
Exegesis
Many countries that have suffered more or less intensely of the throes of a colonial presence went to work as soon as they have recovered freedom to act. A Dutch expert, advisor to the textile sector, told me that after the Second World War, when holding fairs on equipment for this sector, Japanese business men were the first to arrive in the morning and stayed until closing sessions. Six months later, we could find equivalent machines of those exposed in the trade show, manufactured and marketed by Japanese firms with slight modifications like changing the position of some buttons. What was valid for the Japanese was afterwards the case for Chinese and other Asian professionals and increasingly with African industrials and elsewhere. In doing so, we try to reduce the development gap that separates our countries from those that have occupied us in the past. For their part, there is no doubt that the European countries with whom we are in contact are doing their best to sustain this margin that separates us but which continues to shrink to a trickle in terms of current consuming goods. In this respect, quality control in general and especially for food and pharmaceutical products where it now obeys to the same principles, is one of the last refuges where the northern countries have invested their efforts to complicate access to southern countries and keep it for them, through a maze of codes and work standards as a strategic advantage.
The use of animal diseases as argument for selling
At the onset of mad cow disease, several theories have circulated about the identity of the infectious agent without any confirmation with test laboratories for any of those. It is prevention, including the slaughter of sick cattle and those they simply lived with the carriers of the disease, and the prohibition in the future of the sale of organs of animals suspected to be the origin of pathogen in addition to the change in the diet of livestock that have been applied in Europe. Therefore, it was the sum of prophylactic processes that stopped the development of the epidemic (epizootic) of mad cow more than anything else. In the same vein, there is currently no recognized laboratory test for the Ebola virus determination. But beyond the consumption of wild animals by some sub-Saharan populations in conditions far from being well controlled, everyone agrees that it is primarily a disease of the poor, i.e. people living in promiscuity, which have a pronounced deficiency for what are hygiene practices. Therefore, this finding should have guided international aid efforts in focusing on the prophylactic approach. But there is nothing you can sale under this object. By cons, making a well-focused hype around the issue, this has certainly helped groups that are on the lookout to sell all kinds of gadgets whose relevance to the fight against the disease is far from proven, such as portals at airports, thermometers distance and, fear helping, also peddle such equipment to other countries far from the site of infection where illiterate populations are predisposed to swallow any mercantile initiative as long as it is hidden in a cryptic speech. In this respect, people who have been declared dead of Ebola in Africa, or previously, avian or swine flu and other animal diseases, have seen their diagnosis done mainly on presumptions (more or less strong) since there is no reliable laboratory tests recognized for detecting such viruses. The development of such techniques of analysis has never really been of interest for big pharma for reason that the target sick people do not have money to pay for it. The same symptoms at the origin of these assumptions such as diarrhea, vomiting and fever and others are common to all kinds of toxic that pass through the gastrointestinal tract. Then people die every day from everything and anything. But the fact of having recognized the responsibility of a particular virus has certainly given pretext to many merchants of fear to sell their goods, material and frequently false drugs, to numerous countries and companies as is the case for many years now with these scourges which have the foresight to develop everywhere but to stop at the gates of Western countries. It is indeed highly unlikely that kind of quality control exploitation would be taken seriously in the European and American countries where promoters of that type of dummy fears would afterwards be accountable before relevant public organisms and people of good sense. Then they practice their ploy now with us, Africans, as a means of selling because they are increasingly short of ideas of how to take our money without anyone realizes.
Morocco in all of that
In the past, following numerous complaints from both the public and the medical profession, the Ministry of Health had issued a circular in the early eighties to require pharmaceutical companies to control the antibiotics with microbiological testing. This type of assay is used to confirm the integrity of the desired antibiotic by testing its destructive capabilities on the targeted pathogens. Indeed, when the determination of the antibiotic is done only by chemical methods the presence of the macromolecule may be detected even in the case it is inoperative. Basically, the chemical test mentioned is concerned with a tiny bit of the antibiotic molecule and can actually inform on the existence of the macromolecule and its quantification. However, for that very special macromolecule to do its job, that is to say destroy pathogenic bacteria, it needs to fix itself somehow in the infectious microorganism for stopping his activity. This action requires that the antibiotic retains its spatial conformation which depends on the maintenance of its integrity intact. In other words, if the antibiotic was kept in inappropriate conditions, excessive heat or humidity, for example, the molecule may be present but have lost functionality.
The pharmaceutical unit in Casablanca, where I was starting work at that moment did not respond in time to the upgrading mentioned of the Ministry and so has seen its antibiotic products blocked for the sale in 1985 for several months. I myself, with some advice of a fellow Canadian, developed the microbiological assay to be used by the company after that a delegation from the Ministry of Health came in for an audit for validation of the work; something that allowed the release for sale of the batches of finished antibiotic products previously blocked. In this regard, the rules and work practices require that, pending an audit to respond to a competent authority, it was preferable to prepare itself as seriously as possible to ensure the success of the event. That is because the listeners in question also prepare themselves to watch for the slightest mistake on your part that let them to corner you. But to my surprise, the ministerial committee, composed at that time by the Director of the Central Pharmacy, the director of National Drug Control Laboratory (LNCM) and others, did not ask any question about the new method developed to monitor the quality of antibiotics produced by the company! Instead, they talked about worldly matters and acted as if it was a courtesy call and nothing else. The feeling at my level was the one you perceive when you win by forfeit. Indeed, there is a culture that must be respected here for this type of work summarized by the saying: “In God we trust, the rest must come with data“. In the same vein, there is a little over a year a cheese-making unit, of the Marrakech region asked me for a job to do. On this occasion, I was shown a small device, an electrified small plate on which you were supposed to mix a sample of the product to control, the milk in this case, with a few drops of an indefinite chemical, whereupon you would be able to concluding yes or not for the presence of an antibiotic in the received milk. It was a very surprising gadget indeed. But what’s even more amazing is that they reported having shown the material to officials ONSSA who congratulated them for it. Like what, in terms of the culture of quality control in the food, that’s not going to happen very soon.