LABELLING
Solutions to protect pharmaceutical packaging Counterfeit goods – including counterfeit pharmaceutical products – cost a fraction of the price of the original goods. This means that people who under normal circumstances would not have access to those products can now afford them, creating a demand for dangerous goods. TracePack offers a range of anti-counterfeting labelling solutions and track and trace technology proven to protect consumers and the intellectual property of pharma manufacturers.
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ccording to the World Health Organization (WHO), up to two billion people worldwide lack access to necessary medicines, vaccines, medical devices including in vitro diagnostics, and other health products, which creates a vacuum that is too often filled by substandard and falsified products. This problem is growing as global supply chains become more complex, meaning products manufactured in one country may be packaged in a second country and distributed across borders to be marketed or sold to consumers in a third. The growth of e-commerce also contributes to this challenge by making it easier to purchase medicines online, often from unauthorised sources.
Counterfeit medicines affect economies in several areas: • individuals fall victim to low-quality counterfeit products that may not adequately treat their medical needs • legitimate producers can lose sales to counterfeiters, sparking the need for steps to combat fake products and to ensure that counterfeiters do not infiltrate their supply chains • governments and their active involvement in managing healthcare in countries • entire economies, in the form of the impact on crime levels, the environment and possible effects on jobs and foreign investment.
MOST GEOGRAPHICAL AREAS ARE AFFECTED It is often assumed that high-income countries with strong regulatory systems can effectively exclude substandard and falsified medical products from their
markets, but WHO analysis shows that this is not necessarily the case. Reports on these products have been submitted by countries in Western Europe and North America as well as other highincome settings. In an analysis of cases of counterfeit incidents involving the penetration of legitimate supply chains and reported to PSI CIS database between 2009 and 2011, Mackey et al. (2015) revealed that upper and lowermiddle income countries comprised 93% of all cases. Analysis of the health consequences of falsified medicines performed by Rahman et al. (2018) showed that the 48 reported incidents involving health damage due to falsified medicines were almost equally distributed among developing (27 cases, 56.3%) and developed countries (21 cases, 43.7%). TracePack is the licensed African distributor of Arca and specialises in the sale of equipment to mark, code or label any products. The latest labelling system within the Arca Pharma labelling machine line is the Pharma Seal 4.0, which offers high-speed tamper evident label application on pharmaceutical packaging. With a compact stainless steel main base
Shrink wrap inspection
Pharma Seal 4.0 Pharmaceutical tamper seal inspection
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MARCH 2021 // WWW.PHARMACOS.CO.ZA
