Vision

We envisage a near-term future in which consumers in the developing world would be able to place absolute confidence in any medication they purchase or receive in the pen market or from any provision outlet in the public sector.

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In our view, this hope is tied to another one: the desire to see flourishing pharmaceutical industries and healthcare provision services across the emerging societies of the Global South, notably Africa. The economic revival that is evident in these regions cannot be sustained beyond the initial splutter if the timely, efficient, and cost-effective delivery of medication to those who need it cannot be guaranteed most of the time.

Endangered drug supply lines disrupt the realisation of this prospect. Contaminated medication cause untimely deaths, denying economies of skilled and unskilled labour. Where they merely exacerbate disease or introduce new, often more malignant, conditions, the effect is the same: the loss of labour. The socio-economic loss is then compounded by the additional material burdens imposed on society in terms of health costs for those so unfairly affected. Hence, first hard-earned resources are expended on subpotent medication, and then more of these resources have to be found to remedy the effects.

Even where neither immediate deaths nor disease is the near-tem result, the eventual outcome is often the growth of pathogenic resistance as disease-causing organisms introduced to incremental doses of active ingredients gradually adapt to develop defences. This has been witnessed in the case of antimalarial medication in West Africa: entire strands of first-line medication have been rendered virtually useless in the wake of the emergence of resistant strains of malaria pathogens (plasmodia) and more expensive second, and in some cases third, line medication are having to be procured at great expense by resource-strapped public health agencies to deal with a unrelenting malaria epidemic.

What steadily builds up in these contexts is a wholesale breakdown of trust between the public and the healthcare system, leading to citizens resorting more and more to unapproved channels to seek relief for their health problems.

MPedigree’s vision is of robust health infrastructure across the developing world that can withstand seasons of high need without crumbling, and that can stand firm as a pillar of trust in periods of great anxiety.