It’s the lesser-known pandemic: poor-quality medicines cause alarming rates of death and worsened illness across the globe.
An estimated 10.5 percent of medicines worldwide are substandard or falsified, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). A much higher prevalence – around 40 percent – is reported for Africa. A new detection test developed by UK researchers might help weed out poor-quality medicines before they cause harm.
Substandard medicines result from poor manufacturing and quality-control practices as well as inadequate storage conditions, whereas falsified medicines are produced and labelled with the intent to defraud the consumer. Both kinds of poor-quality medicine claim to be something they are not. They are often indistinguishable from the genuine products, making them difficult to spot without running detection tests on their contents.
