Thousands of people in Africa die needlessly each year because of fake and counterfeit medication.

It is a worrying trend released in an EU- funded report on Tuesday.

The vulnerable in Africa suffer the most.

The problem is also the access of the real medicine, the cost to buy them is too high so poor people are just despaired (they despair) to find something, anything that they think could help them.

“I went to hospital, I had a stomach ache. I was prescribed medication but when I went to buy it at the pharmacy, I found it to be too expensive. So I had to buy street drugs, because they are much cheaper”, said Ouagadougou resident, Moustapha Dieng.

But within days, Dieng, a 30-year old tailor, was in hospital. The drugs he was given were counterfeit and only made him worse.

“What we sell comes from all over, there are drugs from Burkina, Nigeria, Lagos, Ghana, it’s from all over”, said drug vendor, Robert Congo.

Substandard or fake anti-malaria drugs caused the deaths of between 64,000 and 158,000 people per year from a perfectly curable disease according to the report.