Exchanging knowledge about falsified medicines: Dr Heather Hamill attends workshop in Zanzibar

This month, Dr Heather Hamill visited Zanzibar to take part in a knowledge exchange workshop exploring the issue of substandard and falsified medicines in Ghana and Tanzania. 

Across the world, a lack of access to healthcare and legitimate medicines means opportunists often seek to fill this gap by selling poor-quality or fake medication.

The UN has estimated that over a quarter of a million people in sub-Saharan Africa die each year because of faulty antimalarial medicines. A further 169,000 deaths per year are linked to falsified and substandard antibiotics.
 

The workshop in Zanzibar was part of the STREAMS project, which aims to strengthen private-sector medicine systems to tackle the persistence of poor-quality anti-infective medicines in Africa. 

Funded by the Medical Research Council, the project sees Dr Hamill and collaborators survey medicine supply chains to identify their vulnerabilities to falsified or poor-quality medicines entering the market. 

The workshop saw participants from eight institutions in Ghana, Tanzania and the UK come together to discuss and draft a series of papers detailing the project's findings. The workshop was part of the ongoing south-south and north-south interdisciplinary skill-sharing and capacity-building initiatives that have been integral to the STREAMS project as a whole.

Collaborators on the project included (from left to right): Mayebe Tubeti, National Institute of Medical Research, Tanzania; Professor Fifi Amoako Johnson, Department of Population and Health, University of Cape Coast, Ghana; Dr Adams Osman, University of Winneba, Ghana; Dr Heather Hamill, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford; Dr Edmund Chattoe-Brown, Department of Sociology, University of Leicester; Dr Rebecca Bilira, National Institute of Medical Research, Tanzania; Professor Graeme Ackland, Department of Physics, University of Edinburgh; Professor Kate Hampshire, Department of Anthropology, University of Durham; Roza Ndaro, National Institute of Medical Research, Tanzania; Professor Simon Mariwah, Department of Geography and Rural Planning, University of Cape Coast, Ghana; Kate Kilpatrick, Principal Researcher, Scottish Government; Dr Gerry Mshana, National Institute of Medical Research, Tanzania; and Dr Daniel Amoako Sakyi, Medical School, University of Cape Coast, Ghana.