Calls for Africa to make own Aids drugs dangerous

Africa must “mobilise local production” of Aids drugs because the global recession threatens the supply of foreign-aid financed imports, the African Union’s Commissioner of Social Affairs Bience Gawanas declared this month.

UNAids chief Michel Sidibé demanded the same thing last month. Both may know a lot about Aids but they obviously don’t know much about economics or drug quality.

These officials are following the World Health Organisation’s similar call for a publicly-funded boost to local drug manufacturing but this idea has a long and dangerous pedigree. Back in the 1930s, American tariffs (designed to encourage American industry) stifled global trade and turned a recession into The Great Depression.

While substandard cars or washing machines are annoying, substandard drugs can kill.

Of course, local production of medicines is not a bad thing: there are many excellent African companies producing high quality medicines.

The problems start when politicians intervene by pouring public money into new factories and into propping up businesses which would otherwise go bust. Quality is usually the first victim.

Meeting demand
The African pharmaceutical sector has developed rapidly and already supplies around 40 per cent of the continent’s demand for pharmaceutical products for HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB. But there are many reasons it cannot yet meet that demand in full.

First, many of the components for drug manufacture have to be imported, typically from Europe or the USA. This can be expensive and requires scarce hard currency.

It also costs a fortune to run plants, which require extremely high levels of safety and hygiene standards, as well as specific professional expertise.

Costs are pushed up by poor infrastructure, such as unreliable electricity supply. Complex modern drugs cannot be copied easily: they need to achieve “bioequivalence,” having the same effect as the original, or they can cause death and drug resistance.

It is, therefore, no wonder that this industry has not blossomed further and that many companies are harming patients: in a study last year in major cities in six countries (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania), half the antimalarial drugs made in Africa were significantly substandard.
The push for State-financed local production is economically illiterate and endangers the health of Africans.

A country that cares about the health of its people must first drop the tariffs and taxes that hamper local production and that deter imports.

Cudjoe is editor of www.Africanliberty.org and executive director of IMANI, Ghana.