About 8 and 10% of all medicines sold are counterfeit

Alarmed by the rising numbers of counterfeit medicines, the Council of Europe's pharmaceutical experts have conducted several investigations into the problem, APA reports.

The size of the counterfeit market is not really known. But the World Health Organization estimates that between 8 and 10% of all medicines sold worldwide are counterfeit. The rate in certain African and Asian states is 25%, or even higher, with Pakistan and Nigeria worst affected of all, at 50%. Counterfeit medicines are still uncommon in the European Union, but their quantities are increasing markedly in eastern and central Europe, especially in the Russian Federation, where 5 to 10% of medicines are believed to be counterfeit.

The investigation shows that current pharmaceutical legislation only partly meets the challenges thrown up by counterfeiting worldwide. Counterfeit products tend to be inert or ineffective, but they have on occasion led to disaster, with 89 victims dying after taking counterfeit cough medicine in Haiti in 1995, and 2,500 deaths in Nigeria the same year resulting from the use of a highly toxic counterfeit meningitis vaccine.

In more recent case in south-eastern Asia, ineffective anti-malarials brought death to many people who had wrongly believed that they were protected against the disease.

Interdisciplinary collaboration by pharmacists, doctors, health service managers, police officers and lawyers has culminated in this book, which takes stock of the current situation in Europe and worldwide and suggests many ways of detecting counterfeit medicines and taking action against them.

It explains how the permeability of medicine markets, the growth of Internet selling and the complexity of pharmaceuticals trade patterns, including some parallel importing, make it easier for counterfeit medicines to be put on sale, even in pharmacies. The book reads that imitation Viagra was seized from a UK pharmacy in 2004, and large quantities of other counterfeit products destined for Internet sale have been seized in Spain. The counterfeiters’ favorites are antibiotics and "lifestyle medicines", such as sexual stimulants and mind-altering drugs.

This book highlights the need to increase vigilance and to fill the legal vacuum exploited by organized crime as technology. Also needed are more investigations and research into counterfeit medicines, new detection methods, better training for members of the pharmacy and health inspectorate and international warning systems.