June 26, 2007

Roger Bate, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and his co-author Kathryn Boateng, have put together a short but powerful expose on the rise of counterfeit and fake drugs in global drug markets. Although the problem afflicts rich and poor nations alike, the greatest impact falls on patients in the poorest countries, where regulatory agencies are weak and epidemics like malaria and AIDS are rampant. Bate and Boateng write that

"Counterfeit drugs contain little or none of the active ingredients of legitimate drugs, with varying consequences depending on the disease. An outright lack of therapeutic benefits may cause death, particularly in infants. But low-strength medicines will only knock out the weaker diseases, leaving the stronger ones to thrive and develop resistance to the drug. This means that even the genuine drug will be rendered useless to the patient; unless he can get access to vastly more expensive second-line drugs, he has no hope. If the disease develops population-level resistance, a whole drug class will be lost."

Read the whole thing: Bad Medicine in the Market.

Posted by Paul Howard at June 26, 2007 05:21 PM