The Right Pill

Africa will be setting up its first agency to check the spread of spurious drugs

- Christophe Hitayezu

ON DECEMBER 10, 2018, drug regulators and health experts from 55 African Union (AU) nations came together in Rwanda’s Kigali to rein in a giant killer: fake medicines in the continent. Sub-Saharan Africa received almost half of the world’s “fake and low-quality” medicines between 2013 and 2017, says the World Health Organization’s (who) report titled The Global Surveillance and Monitoring System of Substandard and Falsified Medical Products. It adds that fake drugs alone kill more than 0.16 million people suffering from malaria every year in the region. This costs $38.5 million to patients and health providers for further care due to failure of treatment.

In August 2017, AU member nations had floated the idea of setting up the continent’s first-ever drug harmonisation programme, under which a medicine entering Africa will be tested using common regulatory guidelines. In May 2018, the idea was given shape when health ministers from member nations met in Geneva and adopted a treaty to set up the nodal African Medicines Agency (ama), under AU’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (nepad), by January 2019 “to harmonise medical regulations of member countries”.