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...

Although counterfeit medicines are a global problem, which sicken or kill at least thousands of people a year, currently international law does not even attempt to criminalize their manufacture or trade as it does currency (i.e. money) counterfeiting - a serious and inexplicable omission. In...

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...

Background: New artemisinin combination therapies pose difficulties of implementation in developing and tropical settings because they have a short shelf-life (two years) relative to the medicines they replace. This limits the reliability and cost of treatment, and the acceptability of this...

Setting: Pharmacies in 19 cities in Angola, Brazil, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India (n=3), Kenya, Nigeria, Russia, Rwanda, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia. Objective: To assess the quality of the two main first-line...

The research-based pharmaceutical industry has a key role in improving access to medicines. By continuing to pursue innovative research and development (R&D), it can improve the availability and effectiveness of drugs. By adopting tiered prices for more drugs — charging people in different...

It should be a cause for celebration that over 1.6 million people in the poorest parts of the world are now on antiretroviral treatment to halt the advance of HIV. But in a rush to improve access mistakes have been made. These mistakes, many of which were predictable, will be costly in terms of...

Drug procurement agencies and organizations spend billions of dollars on drugs for patients in the developing world. These drugs are essential to the health of many millions of patients — but only if they are safe and effective. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Global Fund to Fight...

China’s pharmaceutical market has experienced significant growth in recent years, fueled by increasing wealth among its own population as well as accelerating global demand for cheap, effective medicines to treat ailments ranging from high cholesterol to HIV/AIDS. Along with India, China...

Many Africans lack access to essential medicines. There are myriad reasons for this: poverty, lack of awareness about the need for treatment, confusion over which drugs to take, technical and logistical challenges in procurement and distribution combined with a general lack of local healthcare...