Opinion: Are we making progress in the fight against fake medicines?

The World Health Organization report released this week showing that that 1 in 10 medications in low- and middle-income countries are either substandard or falsified is alarming. The international trade in fake medicines, which rakes in billions of dollars a year, is estimated to harm hundreds of thousands of people every year. Yet this report belies a far more complex and large-scale global health challenge, one that the WHO is not equipped to tackle on its own.

I have spent nearly a decade researching the trade in fake medicines and know firsthand the limitations of trying to understand this dreadful problem. To estimate the size of the counterfeit medicine issue, the WHO, which was launched in July 2013. Although this system can help standardize reporting of counterfeit medicines, it relies on national regulatory authorities, which can limit what it captures.