Fighting Africas Fake Drugs Monster

Project

Ghanaian social activist Bright Simons built mPedigree, a free SMS-based system that lets people check whether a medicine is genuine before giving it to a sick child, in response to a wave of fake-drug deaths in West Africa, including 84 infant deaths in Nigeria in late 2008 from a fake teething syrup laced with the toxic chemical diethylene glycol. Consumers scratch a panel on the packaging to reveal a unique code, text it to a short number and receive an instant reply confirming whether the medicine is genuine, a low-cost approach Simons designed specifically so it could scale without large capital investment, building on existing telecoms infrastructure and industry buy-in rather than new hardware, in a region where fake anti-malaria and tuberculosis drugs alone were estimated to cause around 700,000 deaths a year.