The Impact of Mobile Phones on Global Health

“Dialing for Development,” one of this week’s assigned articles, discusses ways in which mobile phones have been used to spur development in the developing world. In addition to the ways mobile phone technology can be used according to this article, it also has large implications for global health.
A relatively new development in this field has been using mobile phone technology to detect counterfeit prescription drugs. This strategy has been heavily employed in Africa, particularly in Nigeria, due to the large prevalence of counterfeit drugs to fight illnesses, such as malaria. “The United Nations estimates that more than $500 billion in counterfeit drugs is traded every year throughout the world. […] The International Policy Network, blames fake drugs for approximately 700,000 deaths world-wide from malaria and tuberculosis.”
When people take fake drugs, they experience decreased immunity, worsened illness, and even death at times. Mobile technology allows individuals to verify the authenticity of medicine by sending a text message with a unique identification number (found by scratching off a label on the box of the medicine) to a company, such as Sproxil, which received a several start-up grants, a $100,000 grant from USAID and Western Union, and money from a small group of shareholders in Nigeria. Sproxil then sends a text back to verify that the medicine is either “ok” or “fake.”
While I do believe that this technology does present a substantial increase from previously used ways of determining medicine authenticity (namely word-of-mouth, kinship networks, and local medics), I do not believe it to be the solution to all counterfeit drugs sales.
Does this technology help eliminate the original problem, or does it mask it? Is this the most effective and efficient way to address the original problem? How can this technology be improved? Nigeria is Africa’s biggest mobile phone market with 70 million users. Do you think similar technology would work in other places where mobile phone use is less common? How would this new strategy be publicized? Is there room for corruption between the medicine seller and the company/database/program that verifies the medicine?
Source: Connors, Will. "Start-up Helps Nigeria Combat Fake Drugs." The Wall Street Journal, 12 Mar. 2010. Web. 01 Nov. 2010.