Brazzaville Foundation is a partner of the "Medicines We Can Trust" initiative on the occasion of the WHO General Assembly.

It is estimated that one in ten medicines in the world is of poor quality, poorly manufactured or counterfeit. This alarming phenomenon seriously damages people's health, especially in the poorest regions of the world, contributes to undermining confidence in healthcare systems, and can pose a threat to the security of states, due to the development of an underground and criminal economy of trafficking fake medicines.

As the 71st General Assembly of the World Health Organization (WHO) takes place this week in Geneva, the Brazzaville Foundation is proud to support the "Medicines We Can Trust" initiative launched by the U.S. Pharmacopeia. This conference, organised on Wednesday, May 23 in conjunction with the General Assembly, will bring together leading international experts in the field to develop new ideas and a shared action plan to address this global crisis.

It is more than urgent that the international community fully seize this international public problem: the fight against poor quality or counterfeit medicines requires the cooperation of all States - and not only those in the most affected regions, i.e. Africa or South-East Asia - to strengthen control over the regulation of medicines and to detect fakes, to enforce laws and sanctions in a context of trafficking internationalised or to create better information campaigns for patients. The "Medicines We Can Trust" initiative aims to propose ways to develop a roadmap.

This partnership between the U.S. Pharmacopeia and Brazzaville Foundation is part of Brazzaville Foundation 's commitment to fighting trafficking in Africa, the main target of this scourge that affects the health of populations and the socio-economic development of states. We have launched several advocacy initiatives to strengthen the international coordination of actions against the threat of fake medicines. The latest of these was the conference organised on March 28 in London by Brazzaville Foundation, in partnership with the Global Health Institute of Harvard University, which brought together a number of health experts and government representatives to discuss the public health dangers caused by the proliferation of falsified and substandard medicines and the solutions to curb this scourge.

We're delighted to continue this commitment alongside others, such as Harvard University, by supporting the "Medicines We Can Trust" conference.