Tens of thousands dying
from $30 billion fake drugs trade, WHO says
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[November 29, 2017] By
Ben Hirschler
LONDON (Reuters) - 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 on Tuesday.
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In a major review of the problem, 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.
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.
Fake drugs could contain incorrect doses, wrong ingredients or no
active ingredients at all. At the same time, a worrying number of
authorized medicines fail to meet quality standards because of
improper storage and other issues.
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The scale of the problem is hard to quantify precisely, but a WHO
pooled analysis of 100 studies from 2007 to 2016, covering more than
48,000 samples, showed 10.5 percent of drugs in low and
middle-income countries to be fake or substandard.
With pharmaceutical sales in such countries running at nearly $300
billion a year, this implies that trade in fake medicines is a $30
billion business.
The human toll is enormous, according to a team from the University
of Edinburgh, which was commissioned by the WHO to study the impact
of fake drugs.
They 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.
Poor-quality drugs also add to the danger of antibiotic resistance,
threatening to undermine the power of life-saving medicines in
future.
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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."
Since 2013 the WHO has received 1,500 reports of fake and
low-quality products, with antimalarials and antibiotics the most
commonly reported categories. However, the problem extends to
everything from cancer drugs to contraceptive pills.
Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 42 percent of all the reports.
There was no global reporting of this data before 2013.
(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by David Goodman)
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