Sawdust, coffee and dirt

摘要

If your child was sick, industrial solvent would not be your first choice of treatment. But the parents of 109 Nigerian children had to watch them die after feeding them a medicine that had been sold as paracetamol syrup. It was a fake that contained diethylene glycol. The story is only one of many documented cases from the 1990s in Which counterfeit drugs have killed or harmed people in poorer countries, from central Africa to the former Soviet Union. In Bangladesh, for example, 233 children died over a two-year period from drinking adulterated paracetamol syrup. In Burma, scores died after swallowing fake anti-malarial pills. And in Mexico, people treated with counterfeit burns lotions containing sawdust, coffee or dirt developed serious skin infections. Overall, officials estimate that as many as one in every 20 medicines bought worldwide is a fake, rising, in some developing countries to as many as half of all those bought.