Statistics generated by the World Health Organization (WHO) suggest that last week’s revelation by the local Government Analyst-Food and Drug Department (GA-FDD) regarding the discovery that three new fake drugs have appeared on the market and moreover that they have been unearthed in local pharmacies may well be just the tip of the iceberg.
Less than two years ago the WHO disclosed that estimates generated by its own research pointed to the likelihood that as much as 10% of medicines and medical products used in low- and middle-income countries are either falsified or substandard and that these kill hundreds of thousands of patients and result in the waste of billions of dollars each year.
And while the research provides no indication of how bad the problem may be in Guyana, the GA-FDD has told this newspaper repeatedly that the main problem is that its existing infrastructure is not nearly as sophisticated as it ought to be and that apart from its limited capability to detect fake drugs it is altogether unable to pronounce on the likely scale of the problem.
