Using Mobile Phones to Fight Counterfeit Medicine

When the headlines hit in Nigeria just over a year ago, they had an eerie congruence to them. Antifreeze Laced Teething Medicine Kills At Least 34 Children. Multiple batches of counterfeit teething medicine had killed dozens of children -- in some cases, kids as young as four months old.

But while it was a shocking story, it was hardly a new one. In 2006, Panamanian children likewise became the casualties of a broken distribution system, after the government mistakenly distributed counterfeit glycerin from China (mixed into supposedly innocuous cough syrup). Similar stories abound.

I've written before here about the scourge of poor-quality and counterfeit medicine around the globe -- a crisis that some estimate kills up to 700,000 people a year. It's a problem everywhere, but particularly in the developing world: in Madagascar and Senegal, for example, up to 44% of medicine fail all quality testing.

But what if consumers could check the quality of their medicines just by using their mobile phone?* Today in the Wall Street Journal, Will Connors reports that in Nigeria, one company -- Sproxil -- is pioneering a technology to help consumers do just that. Sproxil wants to affix unique ID numbers to drug packaging (hidden under scratch-off labels), which customers can text message to a U.S. database to check whether the drugs they contain are genuine.

This strikes me as a good idea from a cost and feasibility perspective. Nigeria has Africa's largest number of mobile subscribers: more than 70 million users. The unique number idea isn't, well, unique -- the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, for example, is launching a similar system. But it's great the company's strategy actively involves people in the fight to keep meds safe: part of its benefits could be in raising consumer awareness in the first place.

After all, when it comes to counterfeit medicine, there are no silver bullets, and Sproxil knows that. Previously touted anti-counterfeiting measures -- holograms, for example, or tamper-resistant packaging -- have diminished in utility, as counterfeiters have learned to effectively mimic them. In addition to Sproxil's work, other track-and-trace efforts show promise as well (for example, the use of RFID (radio-frequency ID) tags, which contain a sort of wireless barcode), but are far from broad deployment.

And of course, any packaging or tracing system, no matter how clever, won't compensate for what's ultimately needed: better port and border security, greater consumer eduction, factory inspections and quality control -- all key ingredients in the fight against lethal medicine.

*Someday, I realize, all these headlines about using mobile phones to do x, y or z will seem supremely silly (the equivalent of gee-whiz headlines from the 1990s: "Using the Internet to Buy Movie Tickets," etc.) Still, though, it's good to see this kind of innovation taking place.

Photo Credit: DraconianRain