Effects of Counterfeit Drugs on Human Life » 

Counterfeiting has taken an often silent yet devastating toll on humanity due to the lack of reporting in some critically affected areas. Some of the reports that have filtered through give a peek at the true magnitude and miserable outcomes of the fake drug situation:^1,2

• In 1995, after 50,000 people were inoculated in Niger in response to a meningitis epidemic, 2,500 of the vaccinated perished. The donated drugs turned out to be counterfeit.
• Medicinal syrups laced with the industrial chemical diethylene glycol (DEG) caused the death of 89 children in Haiti (1995) and 30 infants in India three years later. DEG was again responsible for the reported loss of 365 lives in Panama in 2006 after 260,000 bottles of cough syrup were unknowingly tainted. Additional toxic syrup deaths have been reported in Bangladesh, Argentina and Nigeria.

In addition to past and present losses due to fake drugs, the future of global public health is at risk. Disease-causing agents for cholera, malaria and tuberculosis can develop resistance to genuine drugs. Counterfeit drugs with non-lethal doses of active pharmaceutical ingredients effectively catalyze such evolution while evading widely-used drug tests.^3,4,5

Perhaps, the greatest single widespread disease being boosted by the presence of fake drugs is malaria. Estimates indicate that in 2002, 2.2 billion of the world’s population was exposed to the risk of malaria resulting in 515 million reports of clinical malaria. About 70% of those cases occurred in Africa, as Southern Asian regions have better access to malaria treatments, reducing the risk of mortality tenfold.⁶ Malaria claims a child’s life every thirty seconds and over a million lives annually but the WHO estimates that 200,000 of those deaths could be prevented if all anti-malarials were genuine.^{4, 7} Drug discovery for anti-malarials can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, take up to 15 years and only have a 10% success rate to result in a marketable product.^{7, 8} The need to recoup such large investments leads to high treatment costs – current alternative treatments for malaria can cost up to 20 times more.⁵

Unfortunately, the increasing prevalence of counterfeiting may not provide an incentive to shift the current paradigm in drug research and development for developing world diseases. Currently, only 10% of global R&D resources address 90% of the world’s disease burden.⁸

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