Fake Drugs Plague Developing World

The development of artemisinin, a traditional Chinese medicine for treating malaria, represents one of the past quarter century's great triumphs in fighting infectious diseases of the developing world. A few years ago, the World Health Organization made a drug combination including artemisinin the first choice for treating malaria in most parts of the world.

However, the latest issue of PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine reports on the growth of a huge counterfeit industry selling bogus artemisinin pills in Southeast Asia. The fear now is that the proliferation of these "knock-offs," which are in fact not artemisinin at all, will soon spread to Africa and undermine nascent efforts to deploy this powerful drug.