Where's the World Bank Plan on Fake Drugs?

Last June, the free online journal Public Library of Science - Medicine ran an important article warning about the proliferation of fake drugs in the developing world. It focused largely on artemisinin, the wonder drug derived from traditional Chinese medicine that is now the world's best hope for combating malaria, which has become largely resistant to older drugs. Last summer, while reporting a story on the development of artemisinin for The Scientist magazine, I learned about World Bank efforts to develop a plan that would largely eliminate the problem.

The plan would implement the Institute of Medicine proposal -- the committee was headed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow -- that the Global Fund centrally purchase sufficient quantities of pre-packaged artemisinin-based combination therapy, and then provide it at very low cost (about 10 cents a dose) to normal distribution channels throughout the developing world. This would push out both chloroquine, which is largely ineffective because the parasite that causes malaria has grown resistant to that drug, and fake drugs, which, of course, don't work.

Today's New York Times story on the problem of fake drugs reports that Global Fund is "considering" centralized purchasing. It's been three years since the IOM report. It's been two years since the World Bank began exploring ways to raise the money needed to implement the centralized purchasing/subsidization strategy. Isn't it time to move past considering and begin acting?