Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8610

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Publication type: news

Asia hit by fake drug epidemic
The Age (Melbourne) 2007 Feb 21
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/asia-hit-by-fake-drug-epidemic/2007/02/20/1171733762811.html

Full text:

AN “EPIDEMIC of counterfeits” of life-saving drugs is sweeping Asia, experts say, and the problem is spreading.

Malaria medicines have been particularly hard hit. In a recent sampling in South-East Asia, 53 per cent of the anti-malarials bought were fakes.

Bogus antibiotics, tuberculosis drugs, AIDS drugs and even meningitis vaccines have also been found.

Estimates of the deaths caused by fakes run from tens of thousands a year to 200,000 or more. The World Health Organisation has estimated that a fifth of the 1 million annual deaths from malaria would be prevented if all medicines for it were genuine and taken properly.

“The impact on people’s lives behind these figures is devastating,” said Dr Howard Zucker, the organisation’s chief of health technology and pharmaceuticals.

Internationally, a prime target of counterfeiters now is artemisinin, the newest miracle cure for malaria, said Dr Paul Newton of Oxford University’s Centre for Tropical Medicine in Vientiane, Laos.

His team, which found that more than half the malaria drugs it bought in South-East Asia were counterfeit, discovered 12 fakes being sold as artesunate pills made by Guilin Pharma of China.

A charity working in Burma bought 100,000 tablets and discovered that all were worthless.

“They’re not being produced in somebody’s kitchen,” Dr Newton said. “They’re produced on an industrial scale.”

China is the source of most of the world’s fake drugs, experts say.

In December, according to Xinhua, the state news agency, the former chief of China’s Food and Drug Administration and two of his top deputies were arrested on charges of taking bribes to approve drugs.

The director, Zheng Xiaoyu, was in office from the agency’s creation in 1998 until he was dismissed in 2005 after repeated scandals in which medicines and infant formula his agency had approved killed dozens of Chinese, including children.

“The problem is simply so massive that no amount of enforcement is going to stop it,” said David Fernyhough, a counterfeiting expert at the Hong Kong offices of Hill & Associates, a risk-management firm hired by Western companies to foil counterfeiters.

In the United States, finding counterfeit drugs in pharmacies is rare, “but we’ve seen a lot from internet sellers posing as legitimate pharmacies”, said Dr Ilisa Bernstein, director of pharmacy affairs for the Food and Drug Administration.

Fake drugs have a long history; the film noir masterpiece The Third Man, based on a real criminal case, involves adulterated penicillin in postwar Vienna.