May 14 (Bloomberg) -- At 12:30 p.m. on May 6, Ampem Dankwah sends a cell-phone message from the lobby of a downtown cafe in Accra, Ghana: “GH4F9H84B4.” His text opens a front in the war on sham malaria drugs.
Within 1.2 seconds, Dankwah’s transmission is routed to a Hewlett-Packard Co. data center in Galway, Ireland, where a computer verifies the code and responds, “OK.” It is the first test of a system developed by HP and Dankwah’s employer, mPedigree Network Ltd., to help millions of Africans avoid counterfeit malaria pills with little or no active medicine, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its May 17 issue.
Under the plan, legitimate drugs will come with a scratch- off panel hiding 10 digits. Consumers will send the code to a widely advertised number, and receive a reply confirming or disputing the product’s authenticity. The system is designed to detect fakes that in some African nations make up half the drugs sold for malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that is the single greatest killer of African children, according to the William J. Clinton Foundation in New York.
“A big advantage of it is that it empowers the consumer,” said Paul Newton, a Vientiane, Laos-based researcher from the U.K.’s University of Oxford who studies counterfeit drugs. Pharmaceutical makers may welcome the development “because it would increase public confidence in medicines,” Newton said in a telephone interview.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=a0_anlNoJCgU
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment