Bad Medicine

 Trade in fake medicines is a $30 billion business. One in 10 drugs sold in developing countries is fake or substandard, leading to tens of thousands of deaths, many of them of African children given ineffective treatments for pneumonia and malaria, health officials said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said that bogus drugs are a growing threat as increased pharmaceutical trade, including Internet sales, open the door to sometimes toxic products. Fake drugs could contain incorrect doses, wrong ingredients or no active ingredients at all. At the same time, a worrying number of authorised medicines fail to meet quality standards because of improper storage and other issues. Poor-quality drugs also add to the danger of antibiotic resistance, threatening to undermine the power of life-saving medicines in future.

Some pharmacists in Africa, for example, say that they are compelled to buy from the cheapest but not necessarily the safest suppliers to compete with illegal street traders. Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 42 percent of all the reports. 

WHO calculated that up to 72,000 deaths from childhood pneumonia could be attributed to the use of antibiotics with reduced activity, increasing to 169,000 deaths if drugs had no activity. Another group from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimated that 116,000 additional deaths from malaria could be caused each year by bad antimalarials in sub-Saharan Africa.

"Substandard and falsified medicines particularly affect the most vulnerable communities," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. "This is unacceptable."