Medi-Quality Security Institute, Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan.
Department of Pharmacy, University of Asia Pacific, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Trop Med Int Health. 2018 Dec;23(12):1294-1303. doi: 10.1111/tmi.13161. Epub 2018 Oct 22.
To analyse and present the literature describing the health consequences of falsified medicines, focusing on mortality and morbidity, as well as the scale of the issue, the geographic extent, the medicines affected, and the harm caused at both the individual and population levels.
We searched for articles in PubMed, using pre-optimized keywords '(counterfeit OR fake OR bogus OR falsified OR spurious) AND (medicine OR drug)'. Searches up to February 2017 yielded 2006 hits, of which 1791 were full-length articles in English. Among them, we found 81 papers that qualitatively or quantitatively described 48 incidents in which falsified medicines caused patients to suffer serious adverse effects, injury, symptoms or death.
The distribution of incidents was examined according to the economic status of the countries involved, regional location in the world, therapeutic category of the medicines, number of incidents and victims by year, and characteristics of the falsified medicines. Among the 48 reported incidents, 27 (56.3%) occurred in developing countries and 21 (43.7%) in developed countries. These incidents involved a total of approximately 7200 casualties including 3604 deaths.
Despite the poor quality of much of the reported data, the results of this study indicate that all types of medications have been targeted for falsification, and falsified medicines have had a serious impact on the health of both adults and children worldwide, with similar numbers of incidents in developing and developed countries.
分析并呈现描述假药对健康造成的后果的文献，重点关注死亡率和发病率，以及问题的严重程度、地域范围、受影响的药品以及对个人和人群层面造成的危害。
我们在 PubMed 中使用预先优化的关键词“（假冒伪劣或伪造或虚假或伪造或伪造）和（药品或药物）”进行了检索。截至 2017 年 2 月的搜索结果产生了 2006 个命中，其中 1791 个是英文的全文文章。在这些文章中，我们发现了 81 篇论文，这些论文定性或定量描述了 48 起假药导致患者遭受严重不良反应、伤害、症状或死亡的事件。
根据涉及的国家的经济状况、全球区域位置、药品的治疗类别、每年的事件和受害者数量以及假药的特点，对事件的分布进行了检查。在报告的 48 起事件中，27 起（56.3%）发生在发展中国家，21 起（43.7%）发生在发达国家。这些事件共涉及约 7200 名伤亡人员，其中包括 3604 人死亡。
尽管报告的数据质量较差，但本研究的结果表明，所有类型的药物都成为伪造的目标，假药对全球成年人和儿童的健康造成了严重影响，发展中国家和发达国家的事件数量相似。
