Dominating this week’s pharma news is a story concerning the investigation into Indian generics giant Ranbaxy Inc.
The company is alleged to have produced
substandard anti-retroviral drugs that were distributed to thousands of HIV-sufferers
in
Now, let us not jump to conclusions. The
investigation is not yet complete and the allegations may be dropped. However,
this does remind us of the vast threat to public health that substandard drugs
can cause – most worryingly due to drug resistance.
Substandard drugs will often contain
inadequate doses of active pharmaceutical ingredient (API). When a person with
a disease takes insufficient doses, the drug will fail to completely kill the
microorganisms of the disease. As the microorganisms are under attack from the
drug, yet not killed by it, they are then able to mutate into new forms which
are resistant to the drug.
This places vast populations at threat from
drug-resistant disease mutations.
One example of such a mutation is the
tuberculosis ‘super-bug’ XDR-TB strain (known in more common parlance as
Extremely Drug Resistant Tuberculosis), which is now endangering Africa.
The WHO estimate that 5% of new cases of TB are resistant, whilst 20% of global
AIDS patients are thought to be drug resistant. Substandard drugs will only increase these numbers.
Substandard drugs are rife in low income parts of the world, threatening to cause public health disasters. The Campaign for Fighting Diseases next month releases a report tackling both this issue and that posed by counterfeit medicines.
Comments