On November 25, in Istanbul, Turkey, Ministers of Justice from Europe and around the world will meet. Many will attend to sign up to the Council of Europe’s MEDICRIME Convention, a proposed treaty to criminalise the manufacture and trade in counterfeited drugs and other medical products. The...

Background: India is an increasingly influential player in the global pharmaceutical market. Key parts of the drug regulatory system are controlled by the states, each of which applies its own standards for enforcement, not always consistent with others. A pilot study was conducted in two major...

A range of antimalarial drugs were procured from private pharmacies in urban and peri-urban areas in the major cities of six African countries, situated in the part of that continent and the world that is most highly endemic for malaria. Semi-quantative thin-layer chromatography (TLC) and...

Nigeria is one of the few countries seriously affected by counterfeit drugs to have actively combated them. As part of this effort its regulatory agency, NAFDAC, has deployed handheld spectrometers to identify fake drugs in the market. In this Outlook, we analyze anti-malarial drug samples...

Background: The Affordable Medicines Facility – malaria (AMFm) is a subsidy mechanism to lower the price of, and hence increase access to, the best antimalarial medicines, artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). While the AMFm stipulates that only quality-approved products are eligible...

Background: Some medicines for sale in developing countries are approved by a stringent regulatory authority (SRA) or the World Health Organization (WHO) prequalification program; many of these are global brands. This study ascertains whether medicines approved by SRAs or the WHO perform better...

This Health Policy Outlook assesses the market for chronic disease medications such as antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to treat HIV/AIDS. A tiered, or differential, pricing structure serves public health by ensuring the greatest affordability of patented drugs as well as maximizing profits to the...

In an effort to increase competition and decrease price, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria recently began asking some grant recipients to use international competitive bidding processes for certain drug purchases. Unfortunately, for countries like Kenya, this request has...

Pharmaceutical products can be of poor quality either because they contain zero correct active ingredient (referred to as "counterfeit") or because they contain a non-zero but incorrect amount of the right active ingredient (referred to as "substandard"). While both types of poor-quality drugs...

Substandard and counterfeit drugs can be lethal to patients and accelerate drug resistance across at-risk populations. This is a major problem for diseases like malaria with few high-quality treatments available. Some African governments, notably Nigeria and Ghana, have responded to this...