One out of 10 medicines in India 'fake'; may cause severe illness: WHO

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An estimated one in 10 medical products circulating in low- and middle-income countries like India is either "substandard or falsified", says a new research report from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

According to WHO, these medicines not only fail to treat or prevent diseases but can also cause serious illness or even death.

"Substandard and falsified medicines particularly affect the most vulnerable communities," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director-General.

The report highlighted that since 2013, the WHO has received 1,500 reports of cases of substandard or falsified products. Of these, antimalarials and antibiotics are the most commonly reported.

Most of such reports (42 per cent) come from the WHO African Region, 21 per cent from the WHO Region of the Americas, and 21 per cent from the WHO European Region.

"This is likely just a small fraction of the total problem and many cases may be going unreported. For example, only 8 per cent of reports of substandard or falsified products to WHO came from the WHO Western Pacific Region, 6 per cent from the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region, and just 2 per cent from the WHO South-East Asia Region," said the report.

The report further says that substandard or falsified medicines promote antimicrobial resistance in people, who can pass on the mutant infection while travelling abroad. Such bacteria or virus resistant to medicine will become impossible to treat.

Noting that antibiotics and other antimicrobial medicines are manufactured and prescribed at doses designed to destroy the pathogens that are causing illness, the report states that if a treatment course contains only a fraction of the correct dose, or if it is so badly made that the active ingredients are not released properly, then it is only likely to destroy some of the pathogens, but not all of them.

The ones that survive will be the ones that have mutated enough to survive low doses of the medicine. Usually, they do not reproduce very quickly. But with all the more susceptible strains killed by the weak medicines, they have room to multiply and spread to more people," said the report.

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