E-DRUG: U.N. launches drive to halt fake drug boom
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U.N. launches drive to halt fake drug boom
Wed Nov 15, 2006 10:41 AM ET
By Robert Evans
GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations, backed by health bodies and police, on Wednesday launched a global effort to halt a surge in the sale of sometimes lethal fake drugs which make up 30 percent of the market in some poorer countries.
A statement from the U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO) said the program will aim to promote greater legal oversight of the sale of drug products and convince governments to treat the fake drug trade as a serious crime and punish it severely.
"The latest estimates....show that more than 30 percent of medicines in some areas of Latin America, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are counterfeit," the WHO declared, citing statistics compiled with other international bodies.
In the richer emerging economies, the figure was around 10 percent but in many of the now independent republics of the former Soviet Union it went as high as 20 percent.
In rich countries, where regulatory systems were strong, counterfeiting accounted for less than 1 percent of the overall drugs market, the U.N. agency said.
But fake medicines accounted for 50 percent of those sold on the Internet by illegal operators -- as opposed to legal pharmaceutical companies that offer drugs at reduced prices but demand medical prescriptions before fulfilling Internet orders.
"Counterfeit medicines ....can harm patients by failing to treat serious conditions, can provoke drug resistance, and in some cases kill," the WHO said as the new program was launched in Bonn through a taskforce, IMPACT, that will drive it.
PROBLEM GROWING
Dr Harvey Bale, director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Associations (IFPMA) who heads one IMPACT working group, told the force's first meeting in Bonn that "the problem is growing everywhere."
In August, the WHO said it believed the illegal trade worldwide was worth more than $30 billion a year -- or between 5 and 8 percent of the total annual market for medicines.
Health and police authorities across the globe say criminal gangs have moved into the business as a lucrative money-spinner. The WHO and Interpol have already mounted an "Operation Jupiter" in Southeast Asia against the trade.
IMPACT -- the International Medical Task Force Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce -- links the WHO with some 20 international partners including Interpol, the European Commission and the World Customs Organization.
Others involved include the Secretariat of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and global and national medical and pharmaceutical bodies.
The WHO said IMPACT would present guiding principles for legislation "to help countries adapt their laws to the gravity of the crime" -- treated in most countries, it said, as no worse than counterfeiting luxury items like handbags or watches.
"In some industrialized countries, counterfeiting t-shirts receives a harsher punishment than counterfeiting medicines," the U.N. agency declared.
(Additional reporting by Ben Hirschler in London)
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