E-DRUG: MPedigree: combatting the sale of counterfeit drugs (3)
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Dear Dr. Pakenham-Walsh,
I would like to comment on the use of MPedigree to overcome counterfeit medicines proliferation in Ghana and elsewhere.
Counterfeit medicines proliferation is a very complex challenge and cannot be solved alone on national level. For this, WHO established the International Medical Product Anti Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT) bringing together governmental, NGO and industry stakeholders on a single platform.
In order to overcome counterfeit medicines proliferation, IMPACT advises to cooperate on international level and amend and line-up the legal, regulatory, enforcement, communication and technology infrastructure in each individual member country. For full details, you may want to access the IMPACT brochure "Counterfeit Drugs Kill" at www.gphf.org/images/downloads/impactbrochure.pdf.
During the discussions within the IMPACT community there was an overwhelming majority that the patient, the consumer, the end user should get protected and not get involved himself to much thus avoiding panic making. Also, it should not be the responsibility of the end user to protect himself against something which should not be there in the first place.
There are many organizational and technological solutions available awaiting their adaptation and implementation for the private and public medicines supply chain. Any technological solution must be fit for global scaling-up thus making it also a economical viable solution. Giving each individual patient pack a unique number code for valid number verification and tracing and tracking is the ultimate goal.
However, this require dispensing of full patient packs and the implementation of affordable tracing technology in each and every corner of the world, the most promising solution currently being the printing of unique serial numbers as barcodes and reading-out at the point of sale by the pharmacist himself with existing scanning technology. This would still require manual work and the system could run itself when using radio frequency labels in the future.
The Ghana mobile phone solution is somewhere in between but has some setbacks: end-user will be involved where it is the ultimate responsibility of public institutions to protect the consumer against counterfeit medicines, not-for-profit operation does not mean that the profit-making telephone provider will not charge each and every call, secrecy of the remote database, double-standard medicines with and without codes.
Involving the end user in Ghana could create a sort of new medicines brands, the ones with numbers getting a new image, a sort of VIP medicines requiring special protection like a show biz or a football star. Similar developments can already be observed with bottled water in China and VISA cards in the Anglophone world - pay more and you will get a VIP VISA card with specialized security futures. In return it means: throw away your standard visa card as there is no warranty on full protection anymore.
In view of counterfeit medicines proliferation observed in the recent past, we at the Global Pharma Health Fund, a charity sponsored by Merck Darmstadt (Germany), set out to develop the GPHF-Minilab, a mini-laboratory based on physical and chemical testing for rapid drug quality verification and counterfeit medicines detection in particular for anti-infective drugs used in priority disease programmes and prevailing in public health. Over 300 units are protecting health facilities against the infiltration of counterfeit medicines around the world already.
Yours sincerely
Richard Jähnke, PhD
Project Management
Global Pharma Health Fund e.V. (GPHF)
Walther-von-Cronberg Platz 6, 60594 Frankfurt, Germany, www.gphf.org
Head Office: T +49-69-962387-600, F +49-69-962387-609, info@gphf.org
Project Office: T +49-69-46939-662, F +49-69-46939-852,
richard.jaehnke@gphf.org
The GPHF is a charitable organization initiated and sponsored by Merck,
Darmstadt Germany