Heroin and cocaine are not the only illegal drugs with a terrible impact on global health. Counterfeit medicines can do much greater damage.

Some of these fakes contain potentially toxic chemicals. Others are like homoeopathic remedies - while harmless in themselves, as they contain no active ingredients, they do not work as advertised. When taken to treat a potentially lethal disease, they can kill.

They are certainly killing in South-East Asia. Artesunate is one of the most effective drugs for treating malaria, and up to half the tablets on sale in the region are counterfeit. Most contain no artesunate at all. The acutely ill patients who use them, many of them children, are taking nothing stronger than a placebo, and thousands are dying as a result. Some fake antimalarials carry a secondary threat. They contain traces of artesunate too small to be clinically useful, but significant enough to encourage resistance to one of the few antimalarials that is still widely effective.

Traffic in counterfeits has traditionally been treated as minor fraud, but there have recently been welcome signs of change. An outstanding piece of scientific detective work, led by the Wellcome Trust and Interpol, has cracked one of the world's worst counterfeiting rings. By analysing traces of pollen and environmental contaminants in fake artesunate, Operation Jupiter has tracked the origin of many batches to one region of China. Six arrests followed, along with the seizure of thousands of fake packets.

This was an important breakthrough, and there is already evidence that it has helped to stanch the flow. Targeting manufacturers, however, can be only part of the solution to this lethal trade. It exists for a simple reason: antimalarials are too expensive, which leaves a market niche for cheap knock-offs that criminal gangs will always find a way to exploit.

A project called the Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria is seeking funding to subsidise accredited factories to produce effective drugs for developing countries. The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria will soon decide whether to provide the $1.9 billion it needs over five years.

The provision of cheaper antimalarials, of course, would be a social good in itself. A positive ruling would also do far more to undermine counterfeiting than forensic science can hope to achieve.

The £80 million funding crisis in British physics - the subject of a damning select committee report last week - may be just the start of the field's problems. One of the biggest slices of the physics budget is the UK's subscriptions to international partnerships such as Cern, the European Space Agency and the European Southern Observatory, and these are all priced in euros. Unless the Government moves to guarantee these against the fluctuating value of the pound, further belt-tightening may soon be necessary.

Mark Henderson is science editor of The Times

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