Medicine Quality

There are severe but neglected problems with poor medicine quality globally, but especially for anti-infective medicines in the tropics. These have important but under-recognised impacts on public health. Poor quality drugs have clear importance for individual patients, in terms of death, treatment failure, prolonged sickness, excess health expenditure, and lost income. Poor quality drugs also have far reaching consequences for society, resulting in loss of confidence in efficacious medicines and health systems, and economic losses to patients, health systems, their employment, and the pharmaceutical industry.  We are conducting random sampling of medicines to objectively estimate the prevalence of counterfeit and sub-standard drugs, evaluating new rapid assessment techniques for medicine quality and advocating that much more is done to improve the quality of the medicine supply. We host the coordination for the new Anti-Malarial Quality module of WWARN (www.wwarn.org) to tabulate, map, disseminate and discuss global data on the quality of antimalarial medicines.