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.

Drug quality is probably improving in Lagos, the largest city of Nigeria, and Accra, the capital of Ghana, which each have serious problems with substandard pharmaceuticals.

Substandard and counterfeit drugs can be lethal to patients and accelerate drug resistance across at-risk populations.

This study attempts to ascertain whether registered medicines perform better in simple quality tests than those that are either not registered or not known to be registered.

Many deaths that occur from malaria each year could be avoided if antimalarial drugs were effective, of good quality, and used correctly.

New technologies can help African countries identify counterfeit or substandard drugs.

A significant portion of antimalarial drugs in Africa have been illegally diverted from the public sector, where they were intended to be dispensed free of charge in public health facilities, to the private sector.