ABSTRACT

Using 1437 samples of Ciprofloxacin from 18 low-to-middle-income countries, we aim to understand the role that regulation and distribution channel have played in signaling and ensuring drug safety. According to the World Health Organization, some poor quality drugs are deliberately and fraudulently mislabeled with respect to identity or source while...

Using 1437 samples of Ciprofloxacin from 18 low-to-middle-income countries, we aim to understand the role that regulation and distribution channel have played in signaling and ensuring drug safety.

Knowing where all our ingredients come from is the first step toward improving drug quality.

When drug patents expire, cheap generic equivalents usually enter the market, drastically reducing prices and costs. Generic competition has arrived for many blockbuster drugs in the past few years, and much more is on the way. Sometimes, the manufacturer of a branded drug offers its own “authorized generic”...

Until government price controls are lifted, the makers of generics will be unable to cover their production costs.

Every day patients receive treatments that do not work properly. For many this means no relief from symptoms, but for some death is the result. Yet concerted action against such products is limited. Before we can discuss why that's the case, I will attempt to explain what kind of products don’t work, and what we should call them.

Since there is no demand for dangerous medicine, international action has a far greater chance of success than the war against narcotics.

Any efforts to improve public health by developing new medicines or by changing treatment policies will ultimately be pointless if the drugs patients actually take contain insufficient or incorrect ingredients.