Gates Fights China Fakes, Drug Failure to Stem Malaria Disaster
The bout of the mosquito-borne disease, for which he tested positive, is his second in a month. The first left him comatose and in danger of dying, before medicines curbed the attack. Coursing through Sarons veins may be the strain so dangerous that health officials –and the billionaire Bill Gates — are racing to stop it from spreading before it kills millions.
In Pailin, a flood of counterfeit pills from China and elsewhere is helping to breed a superbug that resists even the most-effective medicine. The development threatens to unleash a global malaria “disaster” and undo decades of work to reduce illness, destitution and death, said Arjen Dondorp, a Thailand- based researcher.
“Its a time bomb,” said Dondorp, the deputy director of the Wellcome Trust-Mahidol University Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Programme, with headquarters in Bangkok.
The World Health Organization plans to defuse the bomb with a screening and treatment program to contain and eliminate the resistant strain. The effort, in and near Pailin, may begin next month. The program is backed by $23 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, based in Seattle.
“Theres more money put into baldness drugs than is put into malaria,” Gates told an audience in February, in Long Beach, California. “Because the disease is only in the poor countries, it doesnt get much investment. You cant get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much.”
Doom Scenario
The risk of failure raises what Dorndop calls a “doom scenario.” In that sequence of events, migrant workers would first carry the bug to Thailand, Myanmar and India. Later the strain would spread to Africa, which already has 90 percent of the worlds malaria cases.
“We rang the warning bell in 2005 and nobody believed us,” said Pascal Ringwald, the Geneva-based WHOs leading specialist in the malaria parasites ability to resist drugs. “Many people were skeptical.”
The doom scenario may be a decade away from materializing, giving the world time to prevent it, said Charles Delacollette, the head of WHOs Mekong Malaria Programme, which covers Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and part of China.
“We dont have many alternatives” to the antimalarial drug artemisinin, to which the parasite is becoming resistant in western Cambodia, Delacollette said in an interview in Bangkok. “That drug should be protected.”
Interpol Operations
Chemical analysis of pills bought in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam found several other pharmaceutical ingredients, charcoal, and a precursor of the illicit drug ecstasy, according to an account of Operation Jupiter published in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine. Also present were spores and pollen from trees common in southern China, suggesting that at least some of the drugs were made there, the authors said.
“The evidence we have at the moment suggests China and India are sources of fake medicines, including in the case of China, fake anti-malarials,” said Paul Newton, a University of Oxford researcher who monitors counterfeit malaria drugs from an office in Vientiane, Laos.
Market Forecast
Interpols actions hardly dented the global market for counterfeit pharmaceuticals, which may reach $75 billion in 2010, an increase of more than 90 percent from 2005, according to estimates by the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, a nonprofit organization based in New York. WHO says fakes, typically cheaper than real drugs, may account for as much as 30 percent of all medicines in developing nations.
“Were talking about sophisticated, big syndicates, people who are very well organized,” said Aline Plancon, the Interpol officer who coordinated the operations. “Its just insane. Theyre making too much money, theyre betting too much on the health of people. Well do it again and again.”
Deadly Disease
Malaria strikes about 250 million people each year and kills more than 880,000, making it the worlds most lethal mosquito-borne disease, according to WHO.