Kenyans still buying banned Chinese contraceptive ; Here are its side effects

Despite the warnings, the little pink pill remains a popular form of birth control. 

Citizen TV venture into Nairobi’s CBD and on to River Road, to see whether the pill can be purchased in a pharmacy. 

Reluctant shopkeepers would refuse to sell it, saying they did not know what it was.

Another said it was no longer available, while another highlighted the recent news reports, saying she is afraid of that her cover will be blown.

On a third attempt, one shop keeper agreed to sell and insisted we return to her for the next dose after a month.

Sophia is a Chinese herbal contraceptive that is taken once a month. Despite a ban over a decade ago, it is still in circulation, retailing at Ksh.200. 

So what makes this tiny tablet so dangerous?

“The analysis that was done shows the tablet is    not herbal at all. It contains very high levels of estrogrine and progestroren that are toxic to a lot of people,” says Albert Ndwiga, National Family Planning Programme Manager in the Ministry of Health. 

An earlier analysis of the pill by the National Quality Control Laboratory (NQCL) whose findings led to the banning of the drug from the Kenyan market also found that the pills had high levels of levonorgestrel and quinestrol hormones. Over 40 times the allowable dosage.

Levonorgestrel is used by women to prevent pregnancy after birth control failure (such as a broken condom) or unprotected sex.

Quinestrol is an estrogen medication which has been used in menopausal hormone therapy, hormonal birth control, and to treat breast cancer and prostate cancer.

“When that tablet fail which is most of the time you see children born and they expreience different effects from what the mother took and they develop what we call pre-cautious puberty. You start developing secondary sexual characteristics at a very early age. Boys fail to develop secondary sexual characteristics which include of course genitalia growth,” Ndwiga adds. 

Beyond the risks to the child, experts fear what the high levels of estrogen compressed into that once a month pill can do to the mother.

“Estrogen is always looked at fertiliser for certain things. Breast cancer.. People with a high risk of breast cancer are not given estrogen despite how small that dose it. We don’t do it for people who have had blood clots. Because oestrogen promotes blood clotting in the body,” Dr. Nelly Bosire, an Obstetric Gynaecologist said. 

Dr Bosire says though she has only seen the pill once, she has seen complications linked to it in patients she has treated in the past, from abnormal bleeding to thickening of the uterine lining which increases the risk of getting endometrial cancer, or put plainly cancer of the inner lining of the uterus.

Nevertheless the pink pill has a thriving market.

“Interestingly Kenyan women really love anything called herbal because it sounds more natural and not as complicated. And we must remember our plants are chemical components. WE can extract good things and we can extract not so good things,” she adds. 

Another concern is how herbal or traditional medicines or supplements are regulated and deemed fit for human consumption. Legal loopholes often allow certain drugs to slip through as long as they bear the ‘herbal’ tag.

“There are commodities in the market that don’t require prescription so how they are liscensed is a bit more flexible like we see for supplements. And you wouldn’t see them follow set procedures and because of that we don’t know if that was the crack it fell through and first came into the market.”

Over a decade after it was banned Sophia remains popular and in demand. What the Ministry of Health hopes however, is the warning finally hits home this time.