Interchange 2014 Highlights: The Institute of Medicine’s Gillian Buckley Shares Recommendations for Improving the Quality of Drugs in Low and Middle Income Countries.

At PSM’s 2014 Interchange Gillian Buckley shared the Institute of Medicine’s Board on Global Health’s recommendations on how to stop the flow of fake medicines by supporting regulatory authorities and drug manufacturers in low to middle income countries.

Drug counterfeiters target patients in the United States and around the world by taking advantage of countries that have weaker regulation and less robust manufacturing standards than the United States. At Interchange 2014, Gillian Buckley, the program officer for the Institute of Medicine's Board on Global Health, spoke about supporting the efforts of low and middle income countries to stop the flow of counterfeit and substandard drugs. Buckley was the study director and editor of the Institute's recent consensus report, Countering the Problem of Falsified and Substandard Drugs, which lays out a plan to invest in drug quality to improve public health.

Buckley observed that drug regulatory authorities in low to middle income countries are overwhelmed by the need for training, equipment and reference standards, but that external funding for those is hard to come by. Drug manufacturers, too, are hampered by lack of access to loans which would allow them to buy equipment to produce the best quality products. According to Buckley "the committee's conclusion was that the poor in low to middle income countries pay more for lower quality medicine and that…donors and governments of those countries can help improve that situation by building up the national regulatory authorities and by investing in the honest generics manufacturers…by making these hard currency loans available."

Hear Gillian Buckley's comments about these and other recommendations by listening to her on YouTube, below, or watch the entire Interchange panel, Drug Counterfeiters Target Americans.