More than a third of the malaria-fighting drugs tested over the past decade in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia were either fake or bad quality, seriously undermining efforts to combat the disease, a study said Tuesday.
With up to 1 million people — mostly children in Africa — already dying every year from malaria, bogus drugs and those containing the wrong chemical makeup could upend a decade of progress fighting the mosquito-transmitted disease, the U.S.-funded review said.
International efforts to combat drug counterfeiting — much of it believed to take place in China — are urgently needed.
Fake drugs with no malaria-fighting agents can lead to deaths when patients rely on them, and those containing some active ingredients — but not enough to fully kill all parasites — are also problematic because they promote resistance that can eventually outsmart medicines and render them useless.
Alarm bells have sounded in recent years over signs of increasing resistance in western Cambodia on Thailand’s border with Myanmar among artemisinin-based drugs, the only effective medicine now widely used to cure the disease.
Inform Africa for more