For Sale: Lethal Malaria Drugs

by Te-Ping Chen · 2010-02-09 09:49:00 UTC
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Imagine that you head up a nonprofit working in Madagascar, Senegal or Uganda. You've got a great mission statement, an enthusiastic set of donors, and you're making great strides in fighting malaria on the ground. In your last year, you managed to raise a ton of money and have treated 1,000 patients.

Except that, unwittingly, you gave them drugs that don't actually work.

It sounds nightmarish, but that's the situation that plenty of doctors and aid workers easily find themselves in. Poor-quality and counterfeit drugs -- most originating in China or India -- are rife within markets across Africa. In fact, a new study backed by USAID and the World Health Organization found that 26 to 44% of artemisinin-based malaria drugs sold in Madagascar, Senegal and Uganda failed quality testing outright.

And we're not talking about sugar pills masquerading as the real thing, either. In some ways, that actually might be less damaging. No, these pills have some curative properties -- just not consistent or particularly powerful ones -- and are riddled with impurities, too. And with patients getting spotty dosage levels, the spread of such pills may actually be fueling a virulent, drug-resistant strain of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum.

It's hard to know where to start in combating this kind of scourge. I've reported in the past, for example, about how even the European Union and the U.S. haven't been able to stop an influx of counterfeit cigarettes from getting into consumers' hands. Porous borders and dismal coordination between national law enforcement play into the hands of flexible crime networks around the globe. (The USAID/WHO-backed study reports that even government-supported programs -- some of which buy medicine with donor funds -- haven't been able to keep bad medicine off the shelves, either.)

For now, getting the best information can help, so that authorities can better pinpoint which brands and locales are particularly vulnerable. It's only the start of the resources that need deployment, though. To give a sense of the urgency behind the issue, some estimates of the number of people killed per year by fake tuberculosis and malaria drugs range up to 700,000 -- the equivalent of four jumbo jets crashing every day.

If that were the headline, we'd see a lot more conversation. As it stands, though, I'm glad to see USAID and the WHO devoting their resources to the issue. It's a start.

Photo Credit: Pink Sherbet Photography


Te-Ping Chen Te-Ping Chen is a freelance writer and U.S. Truman Scholar whose writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the South China Morning Post magazine, Le Soir, and Slate.com.
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