Are Fake Drugs The Reason Malaria Still Kills Millions a Year?
Malaria, a mosquito-borne parasitic infection that affects about 3.2 billion people in 95 countries, has become largely a disease of the young and poor.
Due to effective medications like chloroquine and artemisinins, malaria deaths dropped an estimated 60 percent worldwide between 2000 and 2015. The Americas and Africa saw the greatest improvements.
Still, 216 million new cases of malaria were reported in 2016, the latest data available. Most of them occurred in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Ivory Coast and Mozambique. And of the 445,000 people who died from the infection, about 70 percent were children under the age of 5.
If malaria is a curable disease with effective treatment, why does it still kill so many?
Our research on the pharmaceutical industry has revealed that one reason for malaria’s continued virulence in the developing world is ineffective medicine. In fact, in some poor African countries, many malaria drugs are actually expired, substandard or fake.
Globally, some 200,000 preventable deaths occur each year due to anti-malarial drugs that do not work. Substandard and counterfeit medicines may be responsible for up to 116,000 malaria deaths annually in sub-Saharan Africa alone, according to recent World Health Organization estimates.
Fraudulent pharmaceuticals are on the rise. Reports of counterfeit or falsified anti-malarials rose 90 percent between 2005 and 2010, according to a 2014 article in the Malaria Journal.
In 2012, a research team from the U.S. National Institutes of Health found that about one-third of anti-malarial medicines distributed in southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa were of poor quality. A few years prior, fully 44 percent of anti-malarial supplies in Senegal had failed quality control tests.
For as long as effective medicines have existed, people have produced fake versions. That’s because counterfeiting pharmaceutical drugs is profitable business for manufacturers. This illegal activity is most common in places with little government oversight and limited access to safe, affordable and high-quality medicines.
