May 15, 2010
Mobile Phones Fight Africa's Drug Wars
New systems that let users dial up to verify antimalarial and other drugs' authenticity could be a major defense against counterfeit meds. Business Week reports. Image from acumen Fund.
While malaria is relatively easy to treat if caught early, it kills nearly 900,000 people a year, mostly in Africa. That's because across much of the continent, malaria medicine is hard to come by, and even when available, it's often fake.
At least two rival systems plan to put unique codes on packages containing antimalarials and other medications. Buyers will be able to text the code to a phone number on the package and get an immediate reply of "NO" or "OK," with the drug's name, expiration date, and other information. "This is a big blow to counterfeiting," says Bright Simons, co-founder of mPedigree, a Ghanaian startup working with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) on one of the systems.
Simons expects to put 10-digit codes on about 125,000 packets of malaria medications in Ghana and Nigeria in a six-month trial starting in December.
Read full article.
Related:
-- Stop Stock-outs, an SMS program developed by Parson University students to track medicine inventories at the local level in many African villages.
-- Text messages across Nigeria are helping to track the distribution of some 63 million mosquito nets – the largest campaign of its kind to date.
-- Members of the public run a "pill check", visiting public hospitals to check the availability of drugs at their local clinic or hospital pharmacy.
-- A new solution developed by IBM, Novartis and Vodafone with the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, is helping to save lives using everyday technology to improve the availability of anti-malarial drugs in remote areas of Tanzania.
-- ... more
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