Activities to Combat Global SSFFC Malaria Medicine

What is Being Done to Combat Global SSFFC Malaria Medicines

Many international partners are working to combat the global burden of SSFFC malaria medicines. Their work generally falls into one of the following categories: drug quality assurance and monitoring, procurement and regulation, criminal investigations and law enforcement, communication and advocacy, promoting reporting and working with the informal sector.

DRUG QUALITY ASSURANCE AND MONITORING

Advancing countries’ abilities to test medicine quality and sharing test results with key stakeholders and consumers are important strategies to combat SSFFC antimalarials. A number of technologies are available that national agencies can use to test the quality of medicines without having to send samples to international laboratories.

The Promoting the Quality of Medicines (PQM) Project, managed by the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), trains and equips regulatory authorities, quality assurance professionals and pharmaceutical representatives to test and evaluate medicine quality. The PQM project has four Official Medicine Quality Control Laboratories in sub-Saharan Africa in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. The USP-Ghana has launched the Center for Pharmaceutical Advancement and Training (CEPAT), which has trained almost 200 African professionals on a number of quality control and assurance topics. Learn more about USP’s work in promoting quality here.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has created a surveillance and monitoring system for tracking and reporting suspicious medicines by its member states, featuring a web-based Rapid Alert System and Rapid Alert Form. (Learn more about SSFFC WHO activities .) The system issues alerts about SSFFC malaria medicines. These alerts can be found on the Rapid Alert website. Organizations like Pharmaceutical Security Institute, Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN) and U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) also track the presence of SSFFC malaria medicines, and have developed online tools to share findings of quality reports from PQM, drug companies and others. ACT Consortium has also focused recent research on quality medicine, testing over 10,000 samples for medicine quality studies in six malaria endemic countries. 

Additionally, the Global Health Assurance Partnership (GHAP) is a new Swiss-based association created to expand upon the success of the Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF). JIATF emerged as a Global Fund-established Special Initiative designed to proactively address the challenge of illicit medicines using a data-driven approach. The coalition of international agencies included Interpol, USAID and United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Like JIATF, GHAP now provides technical assistance and capacity building to national government agencies mandated to respond to pharmaceutical crime. GHAP also expands and scales up efforts to combat the trade in falsified and stolen medicines beyond the initial focus on antimalarial medicines to include other essential medicines and health products at risk of theft and falsification. GHAP offers three core services: Market Assurance Reviews (MARs) providing a detailed picture of the scope and scale of stolen and falsified medicines within a particular country; Supply Chain Assurance Reviews (SCARs) providing end-to-end assurance that subject supply chains are conforming without leakage; and Technical Assistance and Capacity Building to enable National Medical Regulatory Agencies (NMRAs) and other national specialist agencies.

Private companies like mPedigree, PharmaSecure and Sproxil have developed mobile verification technologies that allow consumers to verify the quality of medicines through text messaging. Using short message service (SMS) technology, consumers are able to text a serial number found under a scratch-off surface on the medicine packaging. The consumer will receive a text message from the manufacturer letting them know that the medicine is genuine. If the medicine is not linked to a registered manufacturer, the consumer will receive a notification that the medicine is not genuine, with instructions for reporting to the authorities.