September 18, 2014 Industry news
Speaking at the annual conference for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS), Professor Tony Moffat from University College London explained that fake drugs could be costing the industry around £36.9bn a year, according to research by the World Health Organisation, as well as risking the lives of patients.
Professor Moffat added that the illegal medicines make up around 6% of the global pharmaceutical market, with most of the drugs being bought online. He highlighted a study conducted by Pfizer and the RPS, which revealed that around 50% of those polled had purchased medicinal drugs online without a prescription.
However, during the last decade, it has been reported that 10 examples have been identified of counterfeits entering the legal upstream chain for medicines in Britain. As such, Professor Moffat said it was vital that the European Union-backed Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD) was adopted soon.
Britain must be FMD compliant by 2018, with Sid Dajani, chairman for the initiative’s stakeholder group, warning that a weaker UK upstream pharmaceutical chain could put the country at risk from infiltration by illegal products.
Therefore, Dajani stated that the new system must not only be able to authenticate legal drugs from the counterfeits, such as through processes like barcode scanning and healthcare asset tracking software, but should be robust enough to deter criminal gangs in the first place.
The chairman added that due to lobbying by the RPS and other interested parties, the time it takes to validate pharmaceutical items against a continent-wide checklist had been reduced to a fraction of a second.
A public consultation on the issue is expected for early 2015, when new legislation will be introduced by Westminster.