In developing countries, access to medicine is often limited. To make matters worse, widespread counterfeiting often means that even when patients get access to drugs, the drugs are of poor quality. Dr. Mélisande Bernard, of the Agence Générale des Equipements et Produits de Santé, the technical and pharmaceutical service of the public hospital system of Paris, France (Assistance Publique–Hôpitaux de Paris), is helping to address this problem by developing chromatographic methods to detect substandard cardiovascular drugs in Africa.
