The illegal drugs frequently contain too much, too little or no active ingredient at all, or they may contain toxic substances, posing a risk to the lives of EU patients.

Counterfeit medicines pose a serious threat to EU citizens says the commission (Photo: www.freeimages.co.uk) On Monday (7 December), EU industry commissioner Gunter Verheugen said the extent of the problem is highly alarming.

“The number of counterfeit medicines arriving in Europe …is constantly growing. The European Commission is extremely worried,” he told the German newspaper Die Welt.

Read more here.

The Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM) has long reported on the growing issue of pharmaceutical spam advertising—and now SophosLab Canada has taken a closer look at the solicitation of counterfeit products online.

According to their new report, “The Partnerka: What Is it and Why Should You Care?,” one of the most influential counterfeit networks are the Russian partnerka, which are comprised of hundreds of well-organized spammer affiliate networks that fan out across the world—all working to drive as much traffic to partner sites (and stores) as possible.

And while today’s email services have anti-spam filters to help protect our inboxes, the Internet offers many other ways for the partnerka to peddle their counterfeits, including blogs, online forums and social networking sites.

In addition to buying advertisements on these platforms, spammers employ black hat search engine optimization methods to promote their Web sites and position them in front of Web users conducting searches on similar items. These techniques include creating Web sites that trick search engines into thinking they contain helpful content to Web searchers, as well posting spam messages on blogs, message boards and social networking sites—which are not subject to the same legal and technological requirements as their email counterparts.

As technology changes, so too do the tactics of unscrupulous counterfeit drug peddlers. The PSM reminds Web users to be wary of Web sites or Internet advertisements that promise cheap prescription drugs without physician authorization.

Read the rest of this article here.

There are many reasons for that. First, patients who are treated in hospitals tend to be sicker, often requiring expensive and intensive therapy for critical conditions.

The medications you receive in a hospital are also accompanied by a heavy dose of round-the-clock expert care. A dedicated team of physicians and pharmacists continually monitors and adjusts your medications to help you get better.

This close attention to how your body reacts to all the medications you are receiving is an important part of hospital care. The prescription drug warfarin is an example of the importance of monitoring. Although this is an inexpensive blood thinner, hospital patients who take warfarin daily must be monitored by a pharmacist to make sure that their blood doesn’t get too thin. Likewise, nonprescription medicines like aspirin can cause real problems when paired with other medications while you are hospitalized.

Read the rest of this article on safe medication use.

WASHINGTON—The Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM) issued the following statement regarding the International Internet Week of Action, code named Operation Pangea II, intended to curb illegal actions involving medical products. PSM is a group of organizations and individuals dedicated to protecting consumers from counterfeit medicines.

As an advocate for drug safety, the Partnership for Safe Medicines applauds this international effort, which has the potential to positively impact patients around the world. PSM congratulates INTERPOL, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT) and the law enforcement agencies from the 24 participating countries who took part in the International Internet Week of Action (IIWA).

International cooperation is essential to shutting down rogue online pharmacies and curbing the widespread illicit sale of substandard, unapproved and counterfeit drugs. While investigations in a number of countries are still ongoing, Operation Pangea II has already resulted in a series of arrests, revealed 751 Web sites engaged in illegal activity, 72 of which have now been taken down, and the seizure of nearly 167,000 illicit and counterfeit medicines. The exemplary collaboration between drug regulators, the customs services and the police is evident in these cases.

Read the rest of this statement here.

New York, Nov 20 - Crackdown targets counterfeit drugs
RAIDS HELD WORLDWIDE
Fake medicines a growing enterprise

By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 20, 2009

NEW YORK — In highly orchestrated raids around the world this week, Interpol officers in Europe, drug agents in the United States and task forces from Sweden to Singapore hunted down counterfeit prescription drugs in an effort to stem a rapidly growing criminal business preying on financially pressed consumers looking for bargains.

The operation, code-named Pangea, is expected to be disclosed Friday in an effort to put fraudulent businesses on notice that police around the world are fighting back against what has become a $28 million industry in the United States alone.

The national crackdown uncovered nearly 800 alleged packages of fake or suspicious prescription drugs including Viagra, Vicodin, and Claritin, and shut down 68 alleged rogue online pharmacies. Some counterfeit drugs may have as much as three times more of an active ingredient than is typically prescribed; others may be placebos. Drywall material, antifreeze and yellow highway paint have been found in counterfeit pills.

Read the rest of this article on counterfeit drugs and efforts to put counterfeiters behind bars.

A global public health crisis

Counterfeit medicines represent an enormous public health challenge. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can come across medicines seemingly packaged in the right way, in the form of tablets or capsules that look right, but which do not contain the correct ingredients and, in the worst case scenario, may be filled with highly toxic substances. In some countries, this is a rare occurrence, in others, it is an everyday reality.

Counterfeit medicines range from random mixtures of harmful toxic substances to inactive, useless preparations. Occasionally, there can be “high quality” fakes that do contain the declared active ingredient. In all cases, contents of counterfeits are unreliable because their source is unknown or vague and always illegal. Fake drugs can cause harm to patients and sometimes lead to death.

Any kind of product can be and has been counterfeited: expensive lifestyle and anti-cancer medicines, antibiotics, medicines for hypertension and cholesterol lowering drugs, hormones, steroids and inexpensive generic versions of simple pain killers and antihistamines. In developing countries the most disturbing issue is the common availability of counterfeited medicines for the treatment of life-threatening conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

Counterfeit medicines can harm and kill

The regular use of substandard or counterfeit medicines can lead to therapeutic failure or drug resistance. In some cases, it can lead to death.

A case in Argentina: In 2004, fake medicine led to a trail of death in Argentina.

Veronica Diaz was a healthy 22 year old woman, living in Viedma, Argentina, who had mild anaemia caused by insufficient iron in her blood and required her to receive iron injections. In December of 2004, she became very sick and died of liver failure after receiving the 7th of a 10 injection treatment. The medicines authority of Argentina, ANMAT, determined that she had been given a highly toxic counterfeit. Authorities were unable to determine the source of the counterfeit product due to falsified paper work. While most of the counterfeit production throughout Argentina was recovered and four persons were prosecuted, the highly fragmented distribution system prevented the recall from being 100% successful. In May of 2005 another woman died and a 22 year old pregnant woman was injected with the same counterfeit. She survived but gave birth to a 26 week premature baby. To date, Argentinean law does not consider counterfeiting medicines a crime.

Some other examples are below.

• During a meningitis epidemic in Niger in 1995, more than 50 000 people were inoculated with fake vaccines resulting in 2 500 deaths. The vaccines were received as a gift from a country which thought they were safe.
• 89 children died in Haiti in 1995 and 30 infants died in India in 1998 due to the consumption of paracetamol cough syrup prepared with diethylene glycol (a toxic chemical used in antifreeze).
• In 2001, in South-East Asia, a Wellcome Trust study revealed that 38% of 104 anti-malarial drugs on sale in pharmacies did not contain any active ingredients.
• In Cambodia, in 1999, at least 30 people died after taking counterfeit anti-malarials prepared with sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (an older, less effective anti-malarial) which were sold as artesunate.

Estimates

The US based Centre for Medicines in the Public Interest predicts that counterfeit drug sales will reach US$ 75 billion globally in 2010, an increase of more than 90% from 2005.

Although precise and detailed data on counterfeit medicines is difficult to obtain, estimates range from around 1% of sales in developed countries to over 10% in developing countries, depending on the geographical area. That range takes into consideration both regional disparities in the presence of counterfeits, and specific global market value shares. Apart from the huge differences between regions, variations can also be dramatic within countries, i.e. city versus rural areas, city versus city.

Currently, the sources of information available include reports from non-governmental organizations, pharmaceutical companies, national drug regulatory and enforcement authorities, ad hoc studies conducted on specific geographical areas, and occasional surveys.

Counterfeiting is greatest in those regions where the regulatory and legal oversight is weakest.

Read the rest of this page on counterfeit medicines here.

ICN supports international initiatives to combat counterfeiting and urges nurses and NNAs to collaborate with pharmacy associations, pharmacists, physicians and others to disseminate accurate information on detection and elimination of counterfeit medicines. More specifically ICN supports actions that aim to:

• Strengthen quality assurance and medicines regulatory authorities.
• Detect and expose sources of counterfeit medicines.
• Improve supply of medicines to health facilities.
• Educate nurses in detection and prevention of counterfeit medicines.
• Monitor for any failure of treatment that could be a sign of counterfeit medicine.
• Educate and create awareness among the public of counterfeit medicines.

Background

According to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), counterfeit medicines make up more than 10% of the global medicines available in the market and are available in both developed and developing countries. Though there is no accurate data, the World Health Organization has announced that up to 25% of medicines consumed in developing nations, often to treat life-threatening conditions, are believed to be counterfeit or substandard. All medicines and even vaccines can be counterfeited with serious consequences to patients and the health care system.

Patients and consumers are the primary victims of counterfeit medicines. In order to protect them from the harmful effects of counterfeit medicines it is necessary to provide them with appropriate information and education on the consequences of counterfeit medicines. As frontline health care providers, nurses are key players in increased vigilance for counterfeit medicines and increased reporting of possible counterfeit drugs.

Counterfeit medicines, as deliberate and fraudulent products with questionable efficacy, represent a serious challenge to the treatment or prevention of disease. According to the World Health Organization’s definition a counterfeit medicine is one, which is deliberately and fraudulently mislabeled with respect to identity and/or source.

Counterfeiting can apply to both branded and generic products and counterfeit products may include products with the correct ingredients or with the wrong ingredients, without active ingredients, with insufficient active ingredients or with fake packaging.

Read more here.

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.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 10% of all medicines available around the world are counterfeit.

And counterfeiters do not only target medicines for weight loss, smoking cessation and erectile dysfunction (ED) but also pain, heart and mental health conditions.

The cinema commercial on this site portrays a man pulling a dead rat from his mouth after taking a counterfeit pill. This site allows you to view the commercial, learn more about the dangers of counterfeit drugs and share this information with friends and colleagues.

Watch a video about the danger of counterfeit medicines.

• How do you know when you’ve purchased a counterfeit product?
• What are the dangers of taking counterfeit products?
• How can you avoid buying or receiving counterfeit products?
• How serious a problem is the counterfeiting of prescription medicines?
• What are the causes of counterfeiting?
• What are the consequences of counterfeiting?
• What is Pfizer doing to combat the counterfeiting problem?
• What can be done to improve the situation?
• What can you do to help?

How do you know when you’ve purchased a counterfeit product?

Consumers may not know that the medicines they’ve purchased are counterfeits. That’s why it’s important to purchase prescription products from a pharmacy and pharmacist with whom you’re familiar.

In some cases, patients have noticed a different taste, consistency, or appearance of products that are later identified as being counterfeit, or they may have a different reaction to the counterfeit drug.

If you suspect the Pfizer product you have pruchase may be counterfeit, contact us at 1-800-438-1985

What are the dangers of taking counterfeit products?

One of the biggest concerns is that you may not be getting the therapeutic benefit you expect from the product. For example, a drug you count on to lower your cholesterol level—or to shrink a cancerous tumor—may not be providing any benefit at all because it’s counterfeit. Or the product may contain too much active ingredient, which also could be harmful. A fake drug also could interact with other medications you’re taking and create potential health issues.

Counterfeit products may be manufactured in substandard environments without appropriate controls that ensure their safety and efficacy and they could contain dangerous contaminants.

Given the present environment in which we live, there also is a concern that counterfeit drugs could be used as a tool by terrorists.

Finally, counterfeit products undermine the basic tenet of our health care system: to enable people to live healthier, happier lives.

Read the rest of these Q&A’s on counterfeit medicines.