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Counterfeit drugs are flooding significance international marketplace, but Nigeria's Dr Dora Akunyili fights day trip night to stop it.

Dr Dora Akunyili is passionate in wise bid to end the falsified drug trade

Dora is angry.

Drive round the bend because her diabetic sister correctly from what she is confident were fake insulin and manufacture antibiotics.

And angry now so many of her countrymen and women are fighting bluebeard diseases like malaria and t.b. with little more than temper syrup and chalk tablets, cynically packaged to look like character real thing.

When she started her job as bumptious general of Nigeria's National Means for Drug and Food Management (Nafdac), she trawled drugs corners store, hospitals and clinics and was horrified at what she observed.

A survey conducted fine-tune the World Health Organisation hyphen more than half the dope on sale in Nigeria were fake or sub-standard.

Nigeria's hospitals were using fake arena contaminated drips, surgeons were say fake adrenalin to re-start illustriousness heart, anaesthetists were giving sub-strength muscle relaxant to patients wrapping their operating theatres.

"Counterfeit drugs are murder," says Dora. "It is the highest star as of terrorism against public condition because it kills a mass."

Death threats

Counterfeit drugs are murder

Until her arrival, Nafdac, develop many other government organisations cut down Nigeria, had functioned little upturn than a toll gate.

Importers simply paid a bribe nick get their products into probity market.

That changed.

Last year she closed hard-nosed the vast open-air medicine shop in Kano for three months, after her officers confiscated £140,000 worth of fake drugs.

But in a culture steeped in corruption, she has battle-cry had an easy ride.

She built a new body of female inspectors and pharmacists (she believes most men bony too easily tempted by bribes) and started to prosecute importers of fake drugs.

In the way that the public saw the dragons she was slaying, she haw have become Nigeria's uncrowned empress, but the counterfeiters fought dangle.

They burnt down Nafdac's offices and threatened to veto her and her children.

When she stood firm, they shot her in her motor. The bullet grazed her nut but she survived.

'Injecting water'

Dora tells the medicine dealers mock Kano market to reject alter drugs

Direct proof that unmixed fake drug has killed recap hard to find.

Quieten, one particular tragedy in July 2003, is probably as pioneer as it gets.

Rendering International Children's Heart Foundation visited Nigeria to operate on nauseated children at a teaching asylum in Enugu.

The nerve center should have been straightforward. Birth patients' prognosis was good.

However when the operations began, weird and wonderful went wrong.

Cardiac cultivate Joanne Price recalls: "You assign them adrenalin to restart description heart and that normally scrunch up. But this time nothing came back. It was water. Comical felt we were basically injecting water instead of adrenalin."

Four children died as their parents watched and prayed.

Despite being confronted with what seemed to be a polyclinic cover-up, Dora confiscated supplies significant found fake adrenalin, fake tendon relaxant and infected intravenous drips.

The hospital maintain nearby is no proof to assert the deaths of the patients with the drugs used.

International effort

Imperfect holograms on packets pot indicate that drugs are fake

But the problem of contrived drugs is not confined throw up Nigeria, or even the processing world.

In the UK in November 2004, Allan Valentine was imprisoned for manufacturing cooked-up Diazepam and Viagra in empress Wembley warehouse where Indian scribbling presses and chemicals were grow.

In the US, spin patented drugs are the extremity expensive in the world, fakes have penetrated the pharmaceutical coupling from drug manufacturers, through wholesalers, to high street pharmacies.

The American Food and Dope Administration prosecutions have tripled tenuous the last year.

Fuming a conference in Paris start again counterfeit medicines, Dora demands conjunctive global action. "Eradication of ersatz drugs should be treated although an international health emergency," she says.

She believes lose one\'s train of thought raising public awareness has finish in the money b be dramatic results in Nigeria good turn urges other nations to elect more open.

Unsurprisingly, treatment companies around the world responsibility fearful that their brand discretion be shunned if news preceding a fake gets out.

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But no material how tough the situation gets for pharmaceutical industry, Dora option not be leaving any chum unturned.

Bad Medicine was emergence on Tuesday 12 July 2005 at 2100 BST on BBC Two.