Fifth Of Medicines In Africa Could Be Substandard Or Fake, New Research Says
A fifth of medicines in Africa could be substandard or fake, according to a major research project from Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia.
The research was published in the National Library of Medicine, analyzing 27 studies which found that of the 7,508 medicine samples included in the study, 1,639 failed at least one quality test, confirming that they are either substandard or falsified, according to reports from the Guardian.
“If patients are getting medicines that are substandard or outright fake, it can result in their treatment failing or even preventable deaths,” said Claudia Martínez, the head of research at the Access to Medicine Foundation, an Amsterdam-based non-profit group.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime published estimates last year that showed these falsified and substandard medicines have caused around 500,000 deaths a year in sub-Saharan Africa.
“‘Substandard medicines’ refer to those that are authorized but do not meet quality standards, whereas ‘falsified medicines’ are those that deliberately misrepresent their identity, composition or source,” explained Tharanika Anhillan for the Guardian.
Antibiotics and antimalarial products were among the most falsified medicines in Africa, according to a spokesperson from the World Health Organization.
These antibiotics could contain incorrect dosages or the wrong active ingredients, which leads to ineffective recovery and survival of resistant strains.
Martínez said “several factors contributed to the problem, which left patients without access to essential medicines.
“Pharma supply chains in many low- and middle-income countries are often complex, inefficient and fragmented; the region relies heavily on a limited number of suppliers for essential medicines, and many countries face significant challenges in procuring products in time and effectively policing the quality of products in the market,” she said.
Sean Cavany, a mathematical modeler at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, said: “There is a potential for bias in these types of reviews, for instance surveys which didn’t find any substandard and falsified medicines may not get published, and some of the surveys are not random, so it may be that they have specifically selected samples for this.”
“Also, substandard medicines and falsified medicines will differ greatly over time between countries and between medicines, so producing an average across all of these different factors has the potential to be misleading.”
Martínez said “immediate action was needed to address the problem by governments, national authorities, regulators and pharmaceutical companies manufacturing and selling the products.
We need to strengthen supply chains across the continent by enhancing infrastructure, improving logistics and implementing better surveillance-monitoring systems.
But there is also a lot that pharma companies can do by reporting any cases of substandard or falsified medical products to national health authorities and the WHO rapid alert system promptly and contributing to capacity building.”
A WHO spokesperson said: “Recent incidents of contaminated oral liquid medicines have demonstrated that we need a concerted multi-stakeholder approach to prevent, detect and respond to substandard and falsified products.
“Increasing the public awareness of the scope, scale and potential harm that these products cause is a key activity in this.”
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.