Economic cost of substandard and falsified human medicines and cosmetics with banned ingredients in Tanzania from 2005 to 2015: a retrospective review of data from the regulatory authority.

The economic cost of substandard and falsified human medicines and cosmetics with banned ingredients represent a relatively large loss of scarce resources for a poor country like Tanzania. We believe that the observed increase in the quantities and the economic cost of these products over time could partly be due to the improvement in the regulatory capacity in terms of human resources, infrastructure and frequency of inspections.