Thousands of Fake Pills Removed from UK Pharmacies
Thirty thousand packs of counterfeit life-saving drugs may have been consumed by National Health Service (NHS) patients, including drugs used to treat prostate cancer, strokes, heart conditions and schizophrenia.
When: June 2007
Where: The United Kingdom
How: According to reports by the BBC, reputable UK wholesalers were “duped by sophisticated counterfeits.”
Who: MHRA; National Health Service; Orient Pacific International; Pfizer
Additional details
In June 2007, the Medicines Health products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) issued four Class One emergency recalls on the following life saving medicines:
- Casodex – used to treat prostate cancer
- Plavix – used to treat strokes and heart conditions
- Zyprexa – used to treat schizophrenia
A UK wholesaler spotted discrepancies in the packaging of drugs bought in Europe. A former investigator told the BBC that drugs from other parts of Europe can be purchased at lower prices, and that the UK can import the drugs from the EU under an arrangement known as a parallel trade—after which point the drugs are repackaged with English language packaging. The investigator said that the three drugs “would have pretended to be medicines that were destined for other European markets, in the case of Plavix, they would be in a French language pack.”
The counterfeit packaging wasn’t found until the imports were already in the supply chain, distributed to chemists, doctors and hospitals, and dispensed to patients, according to the BBC.
The head of enforcement at the MHRA said they had seized 40,000 of the estimated 70,000 packs of counterfeit drugs, but issued the recall because 30,000 packs were unaccounted for. The 30,000 missing packs are assumed to have been consumed by patients. It is unknown which patients consumed the counterfeit drugs, and thus it is unknown how many patients were made ill or died as a result of ingesting the counterfeits.
While there is no way to determine which patients received which drugs, the same batch numbers from the drugs were traced to the man at the center of an international fake drugs ring, Kevin Xu, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China and owner of Orient Pacific International.
In August 2007, Xu was indicted for distributing counterfeit and misbranded pharmaceuticals in the United States via the internet, at which time he also faced allegations for introducing counterfeit drugs into the UK supply chain. Xu was convicted and sentenced to six and a half years in prison in January 2009.
Read more about how thousands of fake pills for very serious conditions made it into the UK supply.
