Eliminating poor quality medicines: ‘Caveat emptor, Caveat venditor’ (buyer beware, seller beware)
2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/inthealth/ihy051
ISSN1876-3413
Autores Tópico(s)Intellectual Property and Patents
ResumoMurder by fake medicine: malariaSurvival is not the case for at least 122,000 African children under 5 y of age who die each year as a result of being treated with fake antimalarial drugs. 1 Tens of thousands of others of all ages, with acute malaria and other diseases, are at peril or succumb when the medicines they receive have little or no active pharmaceutical ingredient, contain toxins or are a different compound than indicated on the package. 2 To add complexity, resistance of Plasmodium falciparum to artemisinin in Cambodia was first reported in 2008. 3The problem has spread to several countries in the Mekong basin zone.More ominously, a new mutant lineage in the parasite in the same area has outcompeted other mutations, leading to artesunate-piperaquine resistance. 4This is the first evidence of resistance to artemisinin combination treatment-the widely used drug strategy advised by WHO.At a 2010 meeting at the US National Institutes of Health, called to define a research agenda to deal with the emergence of artemisinin resistance, a presentation was made by a representative from Interpol showing drug raids on facilities making and packaging fake medicines. 5At the same meeting, colleagues from Cambodia and Thailand described the pervasiveness of fake antimalarial drugs in pharmacies in areas near where parasite resistance had been detected. 6 large-scale literature review of the presence of poor quality antimalarials, published in 2012, showed that over 33% of six classes of 3734 antimalarial drug samples tested from Southeast Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa were counterfeit, as were over 42% of the artemisinins.7
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