PHA-Exchange> Fighting Drug Fakes

[claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn]

 from Vern Weitzel <vern at coombs.anu.edu.au> -----

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/opinion/12tue4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Fighting Drug Fakes

Tempted to buy cheap medicines from a pharmacy Web site? Think twice. If the 
Web site shows no 
verifiable street address for the pharmacy, there is a 50 percent chance the 
drugs are counterfeit.

In rich countries, fake medicines mainly come from virtual stores. Elsewhere, 
they are on the 
pharmacy shelves. In much of the former Soviet Union, 20 percent of the drugs 
on sale are fakes. In 
parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, 30 percent are counterfeit. The 
culprits range from 
mom-and-pop operations processing chalk in their garages to organized-crime 
networks that buy the 
complicity of regulators, customs officials and pharmacists.

In Panama, dozens of people died after taking counterfeit drugs made with an 
industrial solvent. 
Often counterfeiters put in real ingredients for their smell or taste, but 
heavily diluted. This has 
sped the emergence of resistant strains of infections, and is probably a big 
reason some malaria 
drugs and antibiotics have lost their power.

Drug counterfeiting can be fought. Five years ago, the majority of Nigeria’s 
drugs were fakes, and 
the country was a major source of counterfeits abroad. When the Nigerian 
government donated 88,000 
doses of meningitis vaccine to Niger during an epidemic in 1995, the vaccine 
turned out to be a fake 
— causing more than 2,500 children to die.

Now the possibility that a drug is fake in Nigeria has dropped to 17 percent, 
according to the World 
Health Organization. The country’s drug control agency is informing people 
through radio and TV 
jingles about fake medicines. It has also fired corrupt officials, hired a 
fleet of inspectors to 
drop in on pharmacies, banned imports from some 30 companies, and begun 
prosecuting counterfeiters.

One of the problems Nigeria still faces is that the penalty for counterfeiting 
medicine is as little 
as a $70 fine — a small price to pay for a crime that can reap a fortune. 
All over the developing 
world, governments treat falsifying medicines as a mere copyright 
infringement, rather than 
potential murder.

The W.H.O. has recently set up a task force that brings together many groups 
that work on 
counterfeit drugs. It is a start. Multinational drug companies — which have 
been reluctant to report 
fakes lest they erode consumer confidence in all drugs — need to do more. An 
international 
convention is also needed to establish stiffer penalties for counterfeiting 
drugs, and marshal more 
funds and support to fight this deadly crime.


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