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What is it that makes us believe in what we read on a medicine bottle? Is it that we trust them or is it severe naivety? This article isn’t here to insight fear into those who read it, but more as expressing a point of view. It has been said that 1% of drugs that are on the market today are counterfeit; and that the people who are creating these drugs are getting so accurate to the real product; that pharmacists are having to educate their staff on spotting the difference in the packaging, rather than the product
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so that they can tell what is real and what is fake. The point that is trying to be made here is that what if your medicine were to have instructions that expressed directions to an extreme dosage; would you query this or would you go ahead and follow what was said just because of the trust that we all put into the medication we take. Because as the packaging is one of the few things we have to differentiate between the real and the fake; what is to stop the counterfeiters, counterfeiting that?
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1% of all drugs are believed to be fake. Some of the key facts behind false medicines are deliberately mislabelled so that they look like other authentic drugs. But the harsh reality is that these medicines can seriously harm and have killed in the past. The harsh realities’ are that the places where you find that regulatory and enforcement systems for medicines are at the weakest, that is where you will get the highest presence of counterfeit drugs.
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33% of all drugs in developing countries are fake. For example in the EU, USA, Canada, Japan and New Zealand there is a relatively low existence of fake drugs, however in many African countries and developing countries like Latin America the presence of counterfeit medicines are exponential. To counter this, a group of shareholders at The Wellcome Trust and medical professionals set up The International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT) in 2006. Their aim is to protect people from buying and taking false medicines and also to prevent the manufacture and distribution of counterfeit drugs.
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Production and Industry. There is a belief that counterfeit drugs are made by multi-national corporations operating in large buildings, made by men in white coats and goggles. However the majority of drug counterfeiters that have been caught, apprehended and arrested run their businesses out of their houses, small cottage industries or backyards. The most dangerous aspect of counterfeit is that the production of them is so cheap. In one case 100,000 fake tablets were found in the UK, these tablets were being sold at prices up to ÂŁ20 yet the production of them was only costing 25p, a shipment then worth nearly ÂŁ1.6 million in total.
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Real?
Fake?
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With the cheapness of production comes a severe degree of callousness of the ingredients that the medicines are filled with. There have been cases in Africa where medicines have been found containing rat poison and pen ink. The commonalities between the drugs are they if they don’t contain toxic ingredients they either contain too much or not enough, for example in America the drug Xenical, which is used to fight obesity, was found with no active ingredient, and an Antidiabetic traditional medicine (used to lower blood sugar) was found in China in 2009 to contain 6 times the normal dose of Glibenclamide. 2 people died and 9 people were hospitalised.
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Are we blind to fake drugs on the market? Can you decipher this code?
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Here is a list of a few cases found:
Metakelfin
(antimalarial) was found in the United Republic of Tanzania in 2009 and was discovered in 40 pharmacies. It lacked sufficient active ingredient.
Viagra & Cialis
(for erectile dysfunction) was found in Thailand in 2008. It was smuggled into Thailand from an unknown source in an unknown country.
Lipitor
(for lowering cholesterol) United Kingdom, 2006 Detected in the legal supply chain: lacked sufficient active ingredient.
Zyprexa
(for treating bipolar disorder and schizophrenia) United Kingdom, 2007 Detected in the legal supply chain: lacked sufficient active ingredient
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IN RECENT EVENTS, THERE HAS BEEN EVIDENCE OF COUNTERFEIT DRUGS THAT WERE BEING SOLD WITH ‘MADE IN INDIA’ WRITTEN ON THE LABEL. HOWEVER THE DRUGS WERE BEING PRODUCED AND SHIPPED BY CHINA. 21
This is a good example of the type of seedy world that surrounds counterfeit medicine. The majority of counterfeit medicines are bought over the internet and the reason for this is that many people find that the prices of medicine are too high. So they seek medication in other places at a cheaper price, it is these cheaper medicines that are fake. This basically starts a vicious circle and is one of the main reasons why the developing nations have such a high populous of counterfeit drugs. 22
THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION IS FIGHTING TO RAISE AWARENESS FOR THE FAKES KNOWN AS SFFC MEDICINES (Spurious/Falsely Labelled/Falsified/Counterfeit)