Low-quality and fake anti-malarial drugs flooding into markets in Asia and Africa are driving drug resistance and threatening gains made in the fight against the disease in the past decade, according to a study by global health experts.
The study found that about 36 percent of anti-malarial drugs analyzed in Southeast Asia were fake, while a third of samples in sub-Saharan Africa failed chemical testing because they contained either too much or not enough of the active ingredient.
The researchers said the problem might be even bigger.
The emergence of resistance to artemisinin drugs — currently the most effective treatment for malaria — along the Thailand-Cambodia border has already been documented.
“Despite a dramatic rise in reports of poor-quality anti-malarial drugs over the past decade, the issue is much greater than it seems,” Gaurvika Nayyar, of the Fogarty International Center at the US National Institutes of Health, said in a study in the Lancet Infectious Disease journal.
“Most cases are probably unreported, reported to the wrong agencies, or kept confidential by pharmaceutical companies,” Nayyar wrote.
More than 3 billion people worldwide are at risk of malaria, a mosquito-borne parasitic disease that kills about 650,000 people a year, most of them babies and children in Africa.
Nayyar said many of the deaths caused by the disease could be avoided “if drugs available to patients were efficacious, high quality, and used correctly.”
The WHO estimates that while less than 1 percent of medicines available in developed countries are likely to be counterfeit, the figure is about 10 percent globally.
The UN agency estimates that as much as a third of all medicines in some developing countries is fake.
As well as putting patients at risk, counterfeit drugs are a constant bane for companies like GlaxoSmithkline, Sanofi and other international drugmakers.
Nayyar’s team analyzed data from both published and unpublished studies that looked at chemical analyses and the packaging of malaria medicines in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where the malaria risk is highest.
Data from seven countries in Southeast Asia — including from analysis of 1,437 samples of seven different malaria drugs — showed that more than a third of them failed chemical testing, nearly half were wrongly packaged and about a third were bogus.
Analysis of data from 21 countries in sub-Saharan Africa that included more than 2,500 drug samples showed similar results, with more than a third failing chemical testing and about one-fifth turning out to be fake.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the