According to an American study, fake drugs or those of poor quality undermine decades of progress against AIDS, malaria or tuberculosis.
False drugs like those of poor quality (insufficiently or too much dosed) invade us! This is the finding published this Monday, April 20 by American researchers in theAmerican Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. In the sights of scientists are antimalarials, anti-tuberculosis drugs, antibiotics as well as treatments against leishmaniasis.
41% of products outside the standards
To reach this conclusion, these scientists rely on data analyzed in the 17 studies published this Monday in the special issue of theAmerican Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, evaluating the quality of drugs used against infectious or tropical diseases. As a result, up to 41% of the approximately 17,000 drug samples tested did not meet the required quality standards.
One of the studies mentions the discovery of a fake anti-malaria drug and another of poor quality against this disease.
Together, they would have caused 122,350 deaths of African children under 5 in 2013. That is 4% of the causes of death for this age group. Other work has uncovered poor quality antibiotics that could be harmful and increase microbial resistance.
Decades of progress called into question?
Conclusion of the experts, these fake drugs or those of poor quality are a serious threat that could jeopardize decades of progress against HIV, malaria or tuberculosis in the world. Several of these studies therefore recommend the implementation of stricter national policies against this phenomenon, which takes on the appearance of a pandemic. The authors thus evoke “a real and urgent threat”.
Gaurvika Nayyar (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore), Joel Breman (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda) and James Herrington (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) thus relate the growing number of reports by States, of infringements in the chains drug production, and the doubling every five years in the number of scientific articles on fake drugs.
“Today, the global drug market makes it difficult to discern domestic and foreign production, demonstrating the need for a global pharmaceutical quality control mechanism to prevent patients from being treated with falsified drugs.” , explains the former director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the American drug agency, Dr Margaret Hamburg.
Methods to fight
Worse yet, the phenomenon “is widespread and underestimated, especially in poor and middle-income countries where regulatory systems are weak or non-existent,” said Jim Herrington, director of the University of Carolina’s faculty of public health. North.
A waste when we know that new technologies to test the quality of drugs are starting to emerge and scientists are reporting encouraging results in four of the 17 studies published Monday.
They cite, for example, tests on simple paper cards that have been shown to be effective and inexpensive as a portable method for detecting very low-quality malaria drugs. But also more sophisticated methods using fluorescence and luminescence techniques which can determine the composition of a drug with greater precision.
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