Major pharmaceutical companies worldwide have ignored the circulation of counterfeit drugs, which has caused malaria deaths among children to rise in developing countries, according to a documentary airing on Friday in the United Kingdom on the Business Channel, the Independent reports. The documentary, titled "The Malaria Parasites," also says that governments have not addressed the issue and that drug companies are concealing the problem out of concern that publicity about their drugs being counterfeited will cause sales of their products to drop. Graham Satchwell, former head of security at GlaxoSmithKline, said, "Each therapy area is highly competitive, so if one person's drug is undermined, their market share will suffer. It takes a brave company to say they have a problem." He added that the "majority of the industry are sitting on their hands," instead of addressing the issue through such methods as radio frequency identification to track their medicines. The circulation of counterfeit drugs is having a particularly significant impact on the treatment of malaria in Africa, where antimalarial drugs are counterfeited on an industrial scale, the Independent reports. Some of the counterfeit drugs contain no medicine and others have traces of real ingredients, which can lead to drug resistance. The malaria parasite has developed resistance to all classes of malaria drugs except artemisinin-based combination therapies, which also are being counterfeited, according to the Independent. Nick White, a professor at the University of Oxford, said, "Resistance to the artemisinins would be an absolute catastrophe for our attempts to try to control malaria." According to White, the circulation of counterfeit drugs is one of the main factors that have caused malaria to become one of the leading causes of death for children in Africa. Dora Akunyili, director-general of Nigeria's National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, in the documentary calls the counterfeiting of drugs "mass murder" (Shah, Independent, 4/13).