| A drug might go through up to 20
processes before it reaches patients.
Since pharmaceutical supply chains are
becoming longer, the risk of counterfeits
making their way into the market is
increasing. Pharmaceutical companies,
associations and politicians are demanding
track and trace devices for traceability
and security against the counterfeiting
of pharmaceuticals.
According to
prognoses by WHO, the sales generated
with counterfeit pharmaceuticals will
reach $75 billion by 2010. This significant
problem requires an urgent solution
to ensure the safety of consumers. A
combination of traceability and anti-fake
marks could provide the answer.
According to the WHO, a counterfeit
drug is a medicine that is deliberately and
fraudulently mislabelled with respect to
identity or source. A counterfeit might
contain a wrong agent, or indeed no active
agent at all. Counterfeiting, however, is
not only limited to the drugs themselves
– often the packaging of pharmaceuticals
is also counterfeited.
Genuine
pharmaceuticals can be wrongly packaged,
so that for instance a patient buying heart
pills might take a completely different
drug without knowing. The fraud cannot
be recognised at first (and sometimes not
even at second) sight if the counterfeit
drugs and the packaging are just too true
to the original.
Besides enormous losses for the
pharmaceutical industry, the immediate
danger for consumers has become more
prevalent. If fake drugs are circulated, this
poses serious health risks for patients. In
the past few years, the case of counterfeit
anti-malarial drugs with the active agent
Artesunat was published in the media
and again made us aware of the danger
of counterfeit drugs. The counterfeits
contained either little or none of the
Chinese herbs that are used to fight the
most dangerous form of malaria. |
