Imagine seeing your child suffering from malaria, one of the biggest killers of children across the world. Symptoms include high fever, sweating, vomiting and convulsions.
But it’s OK, you think, because you bought medicine to combat the disease from a local drugs market.
Now imagine what it must be like to see your child die nonetheless because the drugs you bought were fake.
That is the brutal reality of the multi-billion dollar a year global trade in counterfeit drugs.
More than 120,000 people a year die in Africa as a result of fake anti-malarial drugs alone, says the World Health Organization, either because the drugs were substandard or simply contained no active ingredients at all.
Even medicines that are substandard – containing an insufficient dosage of active ingredients, say – can be deadly, leading to drug resistance, a particular issue for infectious diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.
By some estimates, about a third of all anti-malarial drugs in sub-Saharan Africa are fake. And these fakes can find their way into pharmacies, clinics and street vendor stalls, or be sold online via thousands of unregulated websites.
But a handful of start-ups have been trying to tackle the issue using technology.
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