Agenzia Fides, the missionary press agency of the Vatican, has spoken out against counterfeit drugs
and the approximated 700,000 people expected to die annually due to their pervasiveness.
Fake tuberculosis and malaria drugs alone are estimated to kill 700,000 people a year. A large part of these victims are African. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that up to 30 percent of the medicines on sale in many African countries are counterfeit and have found that nearly half of the drugs sold in Angola, Burundi, and the Congo are substandard.
In 2003, Interpol conducted a survey on the quality of drugs available in Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa's most populous city and found that 80 percent of the drugs available were fakes. In 2008, more than 80 children in Nigeria died after being given medicine for teething pain that was laced with antifreeze.
Fake medicines can be missing key ingredients, use the wrong ingredient, or have insufficient or too much of the active ingredient. In some cases, use of these medicines can increase drug resistance. When there is not enough of the active ingredient, the drug kills some of the parasites or viruses, but the pathogens that are not killed adapt. As time goes on, even if a patent was to be treated with the correct medication, he or she would not be cured.
Agenzia Fides states, “The development of germs resistant to antibiotics and other treatments is a problem that affects all humanity, not just Africans. It is therefore in the best interest of all concerned that smuggling of counterfeit drugs be fought against.”
