Counterfeit Drugs Kill Thousands Every Year

Asia is being swamped with an epidemic of counterfeit drugs and the problem is spreading. Malaria medicines have been particularly hard hit; in a recent sampling in Southeast Asia, 53 percent of the antimalarials bought were fakes. But conterfeit antibiotics, tuberculosis drugs, AIDS drugs and even meningitis vaccines have also been found. These counterfeit drugs cause the untimely deaths of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people every year. For example, the World Health Organization estimates that one-fifth of the one million annual deaths from malaria could be prevented if all medicines for it were real and taken correctly.

"[The drugs are] not being produced in somebody's kitchen," said Dr. Paul N. Newton of Oxford University's Center for Tropical Medicine in Vientiane, Laos. "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.

This story goes on to describe the cleverness and utter deviousness of the fakes, which can give you an appreciation for how dfifficult it is to spot them. It also tells of the dangers of using fake drugs -- dangers beyond merely not receiving proper treatment, but also from unknowingly taking drugs that one might be allergic to and to taking small doses of the proper drug, which can then give rise to drug-resistant forms of malaria.

Cited story.