E-DRUG: Substandard and Falsified medicines- sharing experiences
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[Welcome to e-drug! It is important for each country to have a very strong regulatory authority to control the quality of medicines coming into the country; good collaborations with networks within the country including Customs; controlled distribution networks; and cooperation with other governments.
African countries have the potential to encourage and support domestic manufacture of good medication but manufacture must be according to strict national quality control mechanisms.
These 'Guidelines for the development of measures to control counterfeit drugs' from WHO were prepared in 1999 but remain very helpful and could be shared with your colleagues.
p://whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/1999/WHO_EDM_QSM_99.1.pdf .
It is worth searching e-drug archives for 'counterfeit' - www.essentialdrugs.org/edrug/archives.php - there is a lot of information there that could answer your questions. BS. Moderator]
Good evening,
for the first time I heard about the existence of this e-drug-mail. If I
would have known before I would have participated in this discussion
long ago.
Last year I stayed for 9 month in north cameroon where I worked in a
hospital pharmacy. I think more than the half of our drugs were false
but I wasn't quite sure. But now I understand why I didn't get rid of my
malaria infection cause I took the coartem and the Duocotexine, too.
Besides there's also a preparation of Quinine from Nigeria of which I
think it was a counterfeit drug. The appearance of packaging and the
dragees was suspicious and I suffered some weird side effects.
This issue of "counterfeit drugs" bothers me very much because there are
so many of these in circulation. And the people don't know about it.
Everybody has a strong faith in medecines.
One big problem in Cameroon is the lack of education. My colleague in
that pharmacy had no pharmaceutical formation just some education on
logistics and stockkeeping. Most of the employees in the pharmacies of
private hospitals just have a low school graduation.
My colleague asked me how it is possible to detected false drugs. I told
him to look for license number, the name of producer with postal adress,
batch number and expiring date. Furthermore it is important to work only
with reliable providers. But often this is another problem. There are
often supply shortfalls of the essential medecines at the pharmaceutical
wholesale or the drugs available here are too expensive for the poor
population. Because of these circumstances you are forced to buy at
other providers of which you sometimes don't know the sources.
As a precaution I advised to order the most important drugs at the Difäm
although this isn't a final solution as I prefer to support the local
economy.
Out of my experiences I would like to give the following advises:
* First of all there has to be an education about couterfeit drugs in
general for the pharmaceutical professionals: What is a counterfeit
drug? What are the effects? How to detect false drugs? What have I
to look for? That there is also a problem with low dosed medicines,
especially in the case of Antibiotics or Antimalaria.
* I support the idea of a database of all pharmaceutical companies.
This is a simple medium for the colleagues on-site.
* Another list or sort of forum to enter suspicious preparations which
are to be back traced.
* I'm not sure if it's already possible for everybody to order this
Minilab with someone who trains the professionals how to handle.
I appreciate to stay in contact about this issue because it's such a big
problem with unthinkable consequences.
Best regards
Dorothea ter Haseborg
(pharmacist)
Germany
Dorothea ter Haseborg <dorothea@terhaseborg.de>