Central Africa faces rising threat from counterfeit and trafficked medicines

Countries in central Africa face a major public health threat from trafficking in medicines, fuelled by a gap between healthcare needs and access to safe, affordable medicine, the UN warned on Tuesday.

The six countries of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) have a high prevalence of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV.

But treatment and safe medicines are not always readily available, or are too expensive, which "fuels the development of an illicit market for medical products", warned a new report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the World Health Organization (WHO) and CEMAC.

Traffickers divert prescription drugs from regulated supply chains and national health programme stocks.

They also peddle medicines that are counterfeit, substandard or have not been officially approved.

They include antibiotics, anti-malarial drugs, painkillers, anti-inflammatories and psychoactive substances such as tramadol and pregabalin.

At least 251 tonnes of medicines were seized in Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon between 2020 and 2025, the report said.

- Avoidable deaths -

The trafficking "constitutes a major threat to public health", leading to "treatment failures, poisonings and avoidable deaths", UNODC said.

Sometimes the illicit medicines end up in official healthcare facilities, which are generally perceived as safe by patients, it added.

"To give a sense of the scale of the phenomenon in sub-Saharan Africa, WHO estimated in 2017 that falsified or substandard antimalarials could be associated with between 72,000 and 267,000 deaths each year, and that poor quality antibiotics used to treat childhood pneumonia could be linked to up to 169,271 deaths annually," it said.

Most trafficked medicines enter the region via its sea and river ports, or are smuggled in by air as freight or in passengers' luggage before being distributed to the hinterland along major trade roads.

UNODC said that the illicit trade "fuels organised crime and weakens public institutions" and promotes recreational use of addictive psychoactive substances.

In the CAR, armed groups are earning money by looting health centres and levying "taxes" on shipments of products passing through areas under their control, the report said.

And late last month, customs officials in Gabon seized 17,000 tramadol tablets, which they blamed on cross-border narcotics traffickers from neighbouring Cameroon.