Poorly manufactured medicines kill indiscriminately. For infectious diseases like malaria and HIV, shoddy medicines also accelerate drug resistance. With few new drugs under development, recent progress against these major killers in the poorest countries is precarious.
Bad drugs have become a big problem for one major infectious disease in particular: tuberculosis. And this may explain why, according to new data from the World Health Organization, global TB cases are increasing and claimed 1.5 million lives last year— more than any other infectious disease.
Clinical lead Doctor Al Story points to an x-ray showing a pair of lungs infected with TB (tuberculosis) during an interview with Reuters in London January 27, 2014. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor.
Meanwhile, multidrug-resistant TB cases may be near a million worldwide. Resistant TB is deadly and costs significantly more to treat. Treatment takes two years and the side effects are severe.
The rise in drug resistance is a complicated issue. One key driver is poor adherence to treatment and improper use of medicines. Patients with TB are typically put on a cocktail of drugs for six months, and completing this regimen is often a challenge. In some countries, most notably India, TB drugs are readily available through private providers, where they’re over-prescribed and improperly used.
Medicines that have too little of the active ingredient or are poorly formulated can also create resistance. My research team published a peer-reviewed analysis of over 700 TB drug samples report three years ago[1], which found high levels of substandard TB drugs across 17 emerging markets. Roughly one in ten TB pills sampled failed basic quality tests, with the majority being badly made but not fake. Across African countries, one in six pills failed quality tests.
We recently updated that analysis, with a further 350 samples finding similar results, which will be published soon.
If we’re going to win the global fight against TB, we need better oversight of TB medicine manufacturing and information on failing companies so physicians and patients can boycott certain manufacturers.
Not long ago a patient with an extremely difficult to treat airborne form of resistant TB was detained in the United States after traveling through more than a dozen countries. Unless we are prepared for this scenario to become increasingly common, we had better have better quality control over treatments for the disease—the costs of inaction are unaffordable.
Dr. Roger Bate is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Phake: The Deadly World of Falsified and Substandard Medicines.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1P7J70g
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment