Poor-quality medicines - including

Poor-quality medicines - including counterfeits and those with the incorrect dosage - are a “real and urgent threat” to public health.
So-called “fake drugs” include expired medicines, those with manufacturing defects, and bogus tablets designed to look like the real thing.
“We know that this is an epidemic occurring over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries, and now affecting an extremely large number of people,” said health expert Guarvike Nayyar.
Nayyar is co-editor of a special report on fake medicines in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
The report shows that a decade-long analysis of drug samples found about 11 percent of the drugs in Africa and 3.5 percent in Asia were either counterfeit or substandard.
Counterfeits can sometimes be hard to tell from the genuine product, but if there’s a problem with the drug, it’s more likely that it just won’t have the prescribed amount of the active ingredient.
Patricia Tabernero of the University of Oxford studied the quality of anti-malaria drugs in Laos. She and her colleagues found no fakes, a big improvement from a previous study a decade earlier. However, they did find lots of the medicine was substandard.
Many scientists say there is a need for better ways to test drug potency in the field. Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa says a better legal framework is essential, pointing out that’s how the world deals with problems like this