Fake medicines sold in developing world - WHO

One in 10 medicines in developing countries are fake, the WHO says, with the problem affecting everything from cancer treatments to contraceptives.

Fake medical products and medicines of poor quality account for 10 per cent of the pharmaceutical market in developing countries, according to an estimate by the World Health Organisation.

The Geneva-based UN agency said the most common unlicensed or substandard products are anti-malaria drugs and antibiotics, but the problem affects everything from cancer treatments to contraceptives.

The 10 per cent estimate is based on more than 100 research papers on medicine quality in 88 developing countries, involving 48,000 medicine samples.

This is unacceptable," WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said about the findings, calling for international co-operation to fight the production and international trafficking of such products.

Bad drugs not only cause illness and death, but they also contribute to the rise in bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.

WHO started collecting government reports of such products in 2013.

Since then, it has received 1500 report of cases of fake or bad drugs, 42 per cent from sub-Saharan Africa, 21 per cent from the Americas and 21 per cent from Europe.

According to calculations by University of Edinburgh researchers, at least 72,000 children are estimated to die each year from pneumonia because of substandard and falsified antibiotics.

An estimated 116,000 malaria deaths could be caused annually by bad anti-malaria drugs in sub-Saharan countries, according to a separate study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.