Liberia Fights Fake Drugs

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DAKAR — Liberia is cracking down on the sellers of fake or expired pharmaceutical drugs, but has met some resistance from people, especially in rural communities, who say these black market medicines are all they can get or afford. The traffic and sale of old and counterfeit medicine—a multimillion dollar industry—is widespread in West Africa.

It is not hard to find one of Liberia’s roving drug salesmen known locally as “black bag doctors.” John Harris walking down a county highway just a few kilometers outside the capital, Monrovia, where a VOA reporter met him.

He wore a backpack and carried a bucket. Both were full of unmarked plastic bags of pills that he said were painkillers and malaria drugs. Harris said this is not what he had in mind for his life when he graduated from medical school.

“How does the government expect us to survive when there is no job? So I do this, moving from villages and towns and sell these drugs to the people,” Harris explained. “At least we are helping government. Some of the places we go, there are no health facilities. So I think we are a help.”

But it is a crime to sell medicines in the street without a license. Inspectors from Liberia’s Pharmaceutical Board have been combing the countryside looking for drug peddlers like Harris this year.

Chief Pharmacist Reverend Tijli Tarty Tyee said the pills and treatments these peddlers sell are expired, damaged by sun or humidity, or just fake.

“Medicines sold in this manner will not have the basic ingredients that will bring about cures and as a result of that,” Tyee explained, “people taking the medicines, there is a potential of having microbial resistance to the medicines. When we have resistance to our imported medication, then we are in a very serious, serious situation.”

He said he understands that people need medicines and they need them cheap.

“They want to have a shortcut in getting medicines but that shortcut is dangerous to them,” Tyee said.

The crackdown has met some resistance from local communities and from the peddlers themselves. Tyee says inspectors have been injured during “raids.”

It is harder to go after the source.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime says fraudulent medicines in West Africa are both imported and manufactured locally.

It’s a diffuse supply chain with limited government oversight. Flour has been discovered packaged as the antibiotic amoxicillin. Manufacturers try to raise profit margins by reducing the amount of an active ingredient. Or real medicines can make their way into a street peddler’s backpack once they are past their expiration date.

Experts say the true scope of the problem is near impossible to measure.

The UNODC says even legitimate providers in West Africa, like pharmacists and doctors, can not be 100 percent sure that what they are administering is real.

–Ann Look

Source: VOA News

African Leaders Malaria Alliance Receives $250K Grant to Help Fight Malaria

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The African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA), an alliance of 39 African leaders, has been awarded a $250,000 grant to help with its campaign to combat malaria.

ALMA, chaired by Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete and recently elected Deputy Chair, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia, was launched in 2009 as a collaborative effort for African leaders to work together with the African Union, United Nations and other local and international partners to combat malaria in Africa. The alliance seeks to complement efforts that address the challenges of malaria and aims to raise malaria awareness at the global, national and local levels.

The grant is from the ExxonMobil Foundation, and will support ALMA’s advocacy and communications efforts, as well as technical assistance to governments.

“We are thrilled and grateful to be awarded a grant from the ExxonMobil Foundation, a long-time ally in Africa’s efforts to fight malaria,” said ALMA Executive Secretary Johannah-Joy Phumaphi. “We have recently seen great success in the fight against malaria and we must all remain steadfast in our efforts.”

The past year has seen enormous progress in the battle against malaria in Africa, due in large part to the collaborative work of ALMA, which has been instrumental in accelerating access to and the use of malaria control interventions such as mosquito nets. The World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report 2010 reports 80 percent net coverage and an additional 10 percent coverage when indoor spraying is included. Its focus now is to sustain this coverage and to eliminate preventable malaria deaths by 2015.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the region most affected by malaria in the world, with 90 percent of malaria mortality occurring there. Malaria also accounts for 40 percent of hospital admissions in this region and is a leading cause of workplace and school absenteeism. When accounting for direct costs and lost economic productivity associated with the disease, malaria costs the African economy $12 billion in lost GDP annually.

Source: Business Wire