Substandard malaria drugs in Africa

According to a recent study funded by Africa Fighting Malaria, many Africans are getting substandard or counterfeit malaria drugs.  This is a serious problem as the WHO estimates that malaria kills 1.3 million people each year – mostly children under age 5. 

A report from Reuters stated that:

Tests of 195 different packs of malaria drugs sold in six African cities showed 35 percent of them either did not contain high enough levels of active ingredient or did not dissolve properly.

“Our study shows that efforts to increase access to quality antimalarial drugs in Africa are increasingly important,” Dr. Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute, who led the study, said in a statement.

“These incidents argue strongly for a rule against purchasing locally manufactured medicines, except where those medicines have received regulatory approval from a developed country or the WHO’s prequalification scheme,” they added.

“Substandard drugs not only endanger lives today, but also jeopardize future malaria treatment strategies by accelerating parasite resistance.”

“The World Trade Organization, which sets the rules of global commerce, should enact rules prohibiting the international trade in artemisinin monotherapies and reducing the tariffs on proper medicines to zero,” they wrote.

Substandard antimalarial drugs cause an estimated 200,000 avoidable deaths each year, Bate and colleagues reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.

They said a third of the packs they tested contained only one drug, an artemisinin-based drug. The World Health Organization has asked countries to stop using these so-called monotherapies.

“The high persistence of substandard drugs and clinically inappropriate artemisinin monotherapies in the private sector risks patient safety and, through drug resistance, places the future of malaria treatment at risk globally,” the researchers wrote.

AFM’s larger policy paper on antimalarial treatment in Africa is available here:  http://fightingmalaria.org/pdfs/AFMTreatmentPolicyPaper.pdf