LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - With up to one million people, chiefly children in Africa dying every year from malaria, bogus drugs and those containing the wrong chemical makeup could seriously hinder a decade of progress fighting the mosquito-transmitted disease.

Drug counterfeiting, much of it believed to take place in China, and must be halted.

Even worse, fake drugs with no malaria-fighting agents can lead to deaths when patients rely on them, and those containing some active ingredients, but not enough to fully kill all the parasites, promote resistance that can eventually outsmart medicines and render them useless.

Increasing cases of drug-resistant malaria in western Cambodia on Thailand's border, along with Myanmar have been especially alarming. Artemisinin-based drugs remain the only effective medicine now widely used to cure the disease.

These drugs are taking longer to work in these areas, and experts' fear the emerging resistance could eventually spread to Africa as has occurred previously with other malaria treatments that now are worthless against the disease.

If artemisinin-based drugs stop working, there is no good replacement and many people would ultimately die.  Malaria kills an estimated 2,000 children every day in Africa and some 3.3 billion people worldwide are at risk of getting infected.

"We feel a sense of emergency considering the impact these medicines can have," lead author Gaurvika Nayyar, of the Fogarty International Center said in an email.

The study says more labs are needed worldwide to test for fake drugs, and only three out of 47 malaria-plagued countries in Africa are equipped to do so. Nayyar also calls for counterfeiters to be brought to justice. Currently, laws only exist within individual countries.

"The economic incentives for criminals of drug falsification surpass the risks involved in their production and sale," the authors write.

"Production and distribution of counterfeit anti-malarial drugs should be prosecuted as crimes against humanity," they added.

The review analyzes 27 published and unpublished studies dating back to 1999 that look at poor-quality and counterfeit malaria-fighting drugs.

© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.