Up to 10% of the medicines produced
\nglobally are falsified according to estimates of the World Health Organisation,
\nand this phenomenon affects every country. The situation does not only cause
\nlarge profit losses for the pharmaceutical industry, but also poses a threat to
\nthe persons who purchase the falsified medicine. According to the World Health
\nOrganisation, the percentage of falsified medicine across the entire
\npharmaceutical industry continues to grow due to a number of factors such as
\nthe increasingly complex nature of supply chains, the expansion of electronic
\ncommerce and the lack of the ability to impose sanctions. <\/p>\n
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To cope with the dramatic growth in falsified
\nindustrial and consumer goods, various rules have been established in order to
\nprotect the official supply chain. And, although in the Western countries the
\npercentage of falsified goods is not particularly high, regulations have been
\nnevertheless adopted that serve to identify, detect and track these goods.
\nRecently, a European directive containing medicine safety measures has come
\ninto force. It stipulates that medicine packaging is to contain a special code
\nto prevent falsifying. The president of the College of Pharmacists, professor
\nDumitru Lupuleasa has told Radio Romania:<\/p>\n
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Producers carry out extensive
\nresearch to discover medicines that are effective, on the one hand, and that
\ncan be administered safely, in the sense of not generating secondary effects,
\non the other. We speak of falsified medicine when the medicine is produced
\nthrough other means that the official ones and when it does not meet the
\nstandards based on which the medicine in question has received authorisation to
\nbe marketed in a certain country or region. It’s usually medicine that has a
\nhigh value on the market that is substituted, replaced with something else, an
\nendeavour which becomes profitable for those with such immoral and unhealthy
\npreoccupations. To address the increasingly frequent cases of substitution of
\nmedicines with non-conforming products, this directive was drawn up, aiming to
\nmake sure that the medicines reaching patients are safe.<\/p>\n
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Dan Zaharescu, the executive
\ndirector of the Romanian Association of International Drug Manufacturers
\n(ARPIM), will tell us next how falsified medicines came to be a problem within
\nthe EU: <\/p>\n
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There were some fissures in the
\nstandard commercial drug chain which allowed for the introduction of falsified
\nmedicines. The purpose of this directive is to ensure patients that when they
\nbuy medicines from a pharmacy those medicines are authentic not fake. We are
\nnot talking now about the risks patients take when they buy medicines from
\nother sources than pharmacies – and these are risks that they need to be aware
\nof. If patients buy medicines online, from sources that cannot be controlled by
\nmeans of official channels through which medicines usually circulate, then they
\nwill run serious risks.<\/p>\n
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Preventing the falsification of
\nmedicines requires a complex approach, a key element being the tamper-proof
\npackaging, and this is the idea from which the European Directive started. That
\nis why the Falsified Medicines
\nDirective imposes
\nthe use of compulsory safety features on the packaging of medicines such as a
\nunique identifier, a 2-dimension barcode, and an anti-tampering device.
\nTherefore, starting on February 9, 2019 no drug manufacturer can sell medicines
\nany longer that are not serialised, in the sense that each medicine box needs
\nto have a unique code that can be found in a European database. When
\npharmacists sell such a drug to patients, when they scan it so as to introduce
\nit in the fiscal receipt they automatically check the validity of the serial
\ncode of the respective medicine. If the software indicates that the medicine is
\nsafe, the pharmacist can sell it to patients. Furthermore, serialised packaging
\nneeds to have a seal, a self-stick seal or a safety feature that should prevent
\nthe opening of the medicine box before being sold, as a guarantee of
\nauthenticity. All these measures were taken in the context in which the
\nEuropean Commission, the Interpol, the Europol and the National Agencies for
\nMedicines have identified along the years a number of falsified medicines and
\nhave closed down illegal websites every year.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Up to 10% of the medicines produced globally are falsified according to estimates of the World Health Organisation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":108,"featured_media":77387,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43939],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-156088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-future-starts-today"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n