About 11 percent of medicines in developing countries are counterfeit and likely responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of children from diseases like malaria and pneumonia every year, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.
FILE - In this Thursday, July 21, 2016 file photo, residents of the Kisenso district receive yellow fever vaccines, in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)
It's the first attempt by the U.N. health agency to assess the problem. Experts reviewed 100 studies involving more than 48,000 medicines. Drugs for treating malaria and bacterial infections accounted for nearly 65 percent of fake medicines.
WHO's director-general said the problem mostly affects poor countries. Between 72,000 and 169,000 children may be dying from pneumonia every year after receiving bad drugs. Counterfeit medications might be responsible for an additional 116,000 deaths from malaria mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, according to scientists at the University of Edinburgh and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine commissioned by the WHO.
"Imagine a mother who gives up food or other basic needs to pay for her child's treatment, unaware that the medicines are substandard or falsified, and then that treatment causes her child to die," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement. "This is unacceptable."
Counterfeit drugs include products that have not been approved by regulators, fail to meet quality standards or deliberately misrepresent an ingredient, according to WHO, which published the two reports.
In 2013, WHO set up a voluntary global monitoring system for substandard and fake drugs and has received reports of about 1,500 problematic medicines including drugs that claim to treat heart problems, diabetes, fertility problems, mental health issues and cancer. WHO also reported problems of fake vaccines for diseases including yellow fever and meningitis.
WHO credited the database with saving the lives of several dozen children in Paraguay after an analysis showed they were affected by a contaminated drug contained in a cough medicine that had killed 60 adults in Pakistan several months earlier in 2013.
WHO said the cases of fake medicines it found are only "a small fraction" and that problems may be going unreported. The agency estimated countries are spending about $30 billion on counterfeit drugs.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The world hasn’t seen anything like the unprecedented destruction of housing in Gaza since World War II, and it would take at least until 2040 to restore the homes devastated in Israel’s bombing and ground offensive if the conflict ended today, the United Nations reported Thursday.
The U.N. assessment said the social and economic impact of the war launched after Hamas’ surprise attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7 has been increasing “in an exponential manner.”
It called the level of casualties – 5% of Gaza’s 2.3 million population -- “unprecedented” in such a short time. By mid-April, it said, over 33,000 Palestinians had been killed and more than 80,000 injured. About 7,000 others remain missing, most believed to be buried under the rubble.
“Every additional day that this war continues is exacting huge and compounding costs to Gazans and all Palestinians” said United Nations Development Program Administrator Achim Steiner.
The report by UNDP and the U.N. Economic Commission for Western Asia paints a dire picture of the struggle to survive in Gaza where 201,000 jobs have been lost since the war began and the economy contracted 81% in the last quarter of 2023.
Abdallah Al Dardari, UNDP’s regional director for Arab states, told a U.N. press conference launching the report that almost $50 billion in investments in Gaza are estimated to have been wiped out in the conflict, and 1.8 million Palestinians have fallen into poverty.
Gaza has been under blockade by Israel and Egypt since Hamas’ 2007 takeover, putting tight controls on what enters and exits the territory. Even before the war, it faced “hyper-unemployment” of 45%, reaching nearly 63% among younger workers.
According to the report, the U.N. Human Development Index – which measures key issues for a long and healthy life, for gaining knowledge and for achieving a decent standard of living – has been pushed back more than 20 years in Gaza.
The “productive basis of the economy has been destroyed,” the report said, with sectors experiencing losses of more than 90%. It estimated that the GDP of Gaza could decrease by 51% in 2024.
“The scope and scale of damages have been unprecedented and still mounting as the war still rages on,” it said.
At least 370,000 housing units in Gaza have been damaged, including 79,000 destroyed completely, the report said, along with commercial buildings.
After previous Israel-Hamas conflicts, housing was rebuilt at a rate of 992 units a year, it said. Even if Israel allows a five-fold increase of construction material to enter Gaza, it would take until 2040 to rebuild the destroyed houses, without repairing the damaged ones.
Al Dardari said that after 51 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas in 2014 there were 2.4 million tons of debris in Gaza. In the current war, he said, there are already 37 tons of debris that need to be removed to make space for temporary shelters and other structures which are critical to return some sort of normalcy to Palestinians in Gaza.
“We haven't seen anything like this since 1945, since the Second World War — that intensity in such a short time, and the massive scale of destruction,” he said.
Al Dardari said the preliminary estimate of the cost of an early recovery program for three years, which would bring hundreds of thousands of Palestinians back to temporary shelters in their original locations with community support, is between $2 billion and $3 billion.
The rough estimate for the overall reconstruction of Gaza is between $40 billion and $50 billion, he said.
But Al Dardari stressed that the immediate focus now is on planning for early recovery.
He said the U.N. senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, Sigrid Kaag, and other officials met earlier Thursday with 22 U.N. agencies and went through plans by each one for the initial years after the war ends.
“We are on the verge of developing and finalizing a unified view and early recovery framework that is Palestinian-centered, Palestinian-led and owned by the Palestinian people,” Al Dardari said.
Associated Press Writer Lee Keath contributed to this report from Cairo
The unprecedented destruction of housing in Gaza hasn't been seen since World War II, the UN says
The unprecedented destruction of housing in Gaza hasn't been seen since World War II, the UN says
Palestinians look at the destruction after an Israeli airstrike in Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, April 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
