The next time you’re tempted to buy Viagra, Lipitor or some other medication online, ponder this: there’s a high likelihood that what you buy will be fake. The pill or vaccine may contain a much smaller dosage than stated, or it may lack any active ingredient whatsoever. Worst of all, it could be toxic. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 50% of drugs sold online have either been falsified or altered in some way. And Internet sales are just the tip of a much bigger problem. Falsified medicines are especially prevalent in developing countries; the WHO estimates that up to 30% of drugs sold in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America are fake, including ones used to fight diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.
The issue has long been a preoccupation of major pharmaceutical companies, which lose as much as $75 billion in business every year to counterfeit-drug makers, according to WHO estimates. In 2002, the industry set up a Washington-based agency called the Pharmaceutical Security Industry, run by Thomas Kubic, a former FBI deputy assistant director, to try to tackle the problem. And four years later, the WHO launched an international task force dedicated to the issue. But so far, such efforts have merely highlighted the growing trade. The Pharmaceutical Security Industry tracked more than 1,800 incidents of drug-counterfeiting around the world last year, 10 times the number when it first started monitoring seven years ago. Getting governments and law enforcers around the world to work more effectively to counter the problem has proved hard.
But that may be starting to change. On Monday, the Presidents of two African countries, Thomas Boni Yayi of Benin and Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso, will be among a cluster of international dignitaries and industry experts who will make an international call for action against counterfeit drugs in Cotonou, Benin. The initiative is the brainchild of Jacques Chirac, the former French President, who wants to make the Cotonou declaration the first step of a worldwide campaign aimed at raising awareness of the problem and persuading governments to impose tougher penalties and improve routine testing of medications. The larger goal is to establish an international convention on counterfeit drugs as early as next year. Marc Gentilini, a French medical professor and expert on tropical diseases who is advising Chirac, says the problem is urgent. The lack of clear international rules governing counterfeit medicines, he says, means that trafficking them is currently “less risky and more lucrative than trafficking narcotics.”
Read the rest of this Time article on what the pharmaceutical industry is doing to curb counterfeit drugs.
counterfeit drugs
counterfeit drugs
