Bogus medicines could undermine a drive to get AIDS treatments to millions of people in the developing world, according to the head of the UN-sponsored body set up finance the fight against the disease.
Figures released today showed a record number of people were infected by HIV in 2003, although more money than ever is being spent to fight it.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS, the United Nations group fighting HIV/AIDS, are drawing up plans to get anti-retroviral treatment to three million people in the developing world by the end of 2005.
But Mr Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said the mass roll-out of treatment would bring with it problems of substandard and counterfeit drugs.
"One of the things we are going to see, very surely, is a lot of bogus medicine coming in the slipstream . . . the market will be flooded with these products, be sure," he told an HIV/AIDS Communications Forum in London.
Bogus drugs are already a major problem in many Asian and African countries. The WHO warned earlier this month that counterfeiting, mostly of antibiotics and drugs to treat tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS, was widespread and "often leads to death".
In Thailand, substandard medicines are thought to account for 8.5 per cent of all supplies on the market. A recent WHO survey of anti-malarials in seven African countries found 20-90 per cent failed quality testing.