SMRs and AMRs

Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Making tuberculosis worse

Feeding a Disease With Fake Drugs

By ROGER BATE, NYT

WASHINGTON

MORE than eight million people get sick with tuberculosis every year, according to the World Health Organization. In 2011, 1.4 million died from it, making it the world’s deadliest infectious disease after AIDS. Thanks to billions of dollars spent on diagnosis and treatment over the past decade, deaths and infections are slowly declining. Yet a disturbing phenomenon has emerged that could not only reverse any gains we’ve made, but also encourage the spread of a newly resistant form of the disease.

In the largest study of its kind, to be published today in the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, colleagues and I have found that fake and poorly made antibiotics are being widely used to treat tuberculosis. These substandard drugs are almost certainly making the disease more resistant to drugs, posing a grave health threat to communities around the world.

Our research team collected samples of two commonly used medicines, isoniazid and rifampicin, from neighborhood pharmacies and markets in 17 countries where tuberculosis is pervasive across Africa, Asia, South America and Europe. Nearly one of every 10 pills we collected failed to meet basic quality standards. In African countries, one in six pills was substandard.

Failing pills typically had too little of the active ingredient — the molecule that destroys tuberculosis bacteria. Most of these drugs came from legitimate manufacturers; they were either poorly made or corroded in transit. The rest appeared genuine, but after researchers tested them and more closely analyzed the packaging, they turned out to be fakes — produced and distributed through criminal enterprises. A pack of fake pills might sell for a dollar on the streets of India, but estimates of the global market for fake drugs range into the tens of billions of dollars.

(More here.)

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