Over the past decade my research team has sampled over ten thousand medicines to treat antimicrobial infections (including malaria and tuberculosis) from emerging markets. All of these have been subjected to a set of basic quality assessments, which found that approximately two percent were fake (made by criminals hiding the true source of the medicine) and about 7% were substandard (made poorly by a legal manufacturer).
But over time, roughly 8% (899 samples) have also been assessed with more complex instruments, and those data are just published in the peer review journal Internal Medicine Review. The most interesting result is that no new fake medicines were unearthed, but over four percent more susbtandard medicines were found.
