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Fake drugs killing kids worldwide

Says new global report

Cnn Online
The deaths of children are a cause for misery, and new research suggests one of the gravest perils comes in the form of falsified and substandard drugs for treating malaria, pneumonia and other diseases. Hundreds of thousands of children each year are dying due to a surge of poor-quality or outright fake medicines, the report says.
"We're talking about 300,000 - at least - children who have died because of murder-by-alleged-medicines distributed by criminals," said Dr Joel Breman, a co-author of the report and senior scientific adviser emeritus at the Fogarty International Center of the US National Institutes of Health.
The World Health Organization has defined three types of falsified and substandard medical products.
"Falsified medical products" deliberately misrepresent their identity, composition or source. "Substandard medical products” are regulated drugs that somehow fail to meet quality standards or specifications - for example, they have less than needed amounts of an active pharmaceutical
ingredients. "Unregistered or unlicensed medical products" are untested and unapproved drugs.
WHERE IS IT HAPPENING?
The number of falsified and substandard medical products is on the rise, according to Breman and his coauthors on the report, published Monday in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. In 2008, for example, Pfizer Global Security, the drugmaker's team working to counteract counterfeit drugs, identified 29 of its products in 75 countries as being falsified. Just 10 years later, Pfizer found 95 fakes in
113 countries.
"Our focus was initially and still is on the poor countries because they have no control and a high burden of disease," said Breman, who is also president-elect of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
He said the "impact" of falsified and substandard drugs is estimated to be as high as 10% of all medicines, costing up to $200 billion, in low- and middleincome countries.
One of two primary areas of concern in these countries is antimalarials, which may be responsible for the deaths of more than 150,000 children each year, Breman said. Antimalarials and
artemisinin combination therapy (often called ACT) are the best solution for treating malaria.
The ACT-watch program, a division within the health-focused non-profit Population Services International, monitors these medications in eight African countries. The program found that a full quarter of ACTs available in the field were non-quality-assured.
A second key concern in low- and middle-income countries is antibiotics for treating childhood pneumonia, Breman said: Each year, antibiotics that are either fake or substandard cause as many childhood fatalities as fake antimalarials.
INT'L EFFORTS NEEDED
" Most of the cases that we see are falsified -- so that means somebody has set out intentionally to deceive you that it's the real thing when it isn't," said Michael Deats, WHO's group lead of Substandard and Falsified Medical Products. "That's criminal activity."
Deats, who was not involved in the new study, said that falsified and substandard medicines have been a "really hot political issue" foryears, but before 2012, "it got mixed up with protection of intellectual property rights versus protection of public health."
Since then, though, WHO arrived at clearer definitions and put in place "a
work plan to prevent, detect and respond to substandard and falsified medicines."
Low- and middle-income countries are particularly vulnerable due to porous borders and weak regulatory capacities. "One in 10 medicines in low- and middle-income countries, on average, failed quality testing," Deats said.
High-income countries are not immune to the problem, thanks to the Internet: both online unregistered pharmacies and “smartphone applications which allow you to order medicines without prescriptions and have them delivered by a guy on a motorbike that turns up at your home," Deats added.