Fake medication could be on sale at various Swedish state pharmacies

Tuesday, 22 May 2012
Counterfeit medicines are not only sold on the Internet. In at least 56 countries, ineffective copies have been sold in the real pharmacy – resulting to people dying. And no one can guarantee that Swedish pharmacies are free of counterfeits.

By the year 2017, the European pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry would have introduced a new secure system to prevent counterfeit drugs end up in pharmacies.
Each box of medicine can be traced from the customer to the factory. But before the new system starts running, there is no guarantee that Swedish pharmacies are not affected by counterfeiting today.

“There is a growing problem, but hopefully we have no counterfeits in the legal supply chain. But we can not guarantee,” says Anita Finne Grahnen, an expert in the organisation, LIF, the trade organization for research-based pharmaceutical companies in Sweden.

Both in Europe and the United States, forged samples of vital medicines are sold in pharmacies.
In England, a copy of the drug Zyprexa, mainly used to treat psychosis, was discovered. The drug lacked the active ingredient.

And in the United States it was revealed a few years ago that a fake version of cancer drug Avastin was in circulation in the heart of the medicine supply chain. It was a Danish wholesaler that had shipped out the drug that proved to be completely ineffective. In April this year came new alarms about false Avastin drugs exported from England.

These events are a horror scenario for the pharmaceutical industry.
“It is a heinous crime. If ones take the medicine for cancer and it does not help and they’ll die. Who checks when the medication was really genuine? No! It's almost the perfect crime,”
said David Shore, Global Security at Pfizer.

According to David Shore, the problem of counterfeit drugs is far from limited to Viagra sales online. On the contrary, counterfeited are sold in all sorts of drugs stores.

“We have received reports of counterfeit medicines from 105 countries. In 56 countries, we have found counterfeit versions of our products into the legitimate supply chain. These are 23 different products, including growth hormone, anti-malaria vaccine, cancer medicine,” says David Shore.

Sweden has not yet found any instances of false medicine, but a few years ago it was revealed a load of genuine medicines in counterfeit packaging.
The Swedish import of drugs is mostly of two kinds of actors, direct importers by the manufacturers and parallel importers. There are about 15 parallel importers who are approved by the Swedish Medical Product Agency (MPA).
They buy up lots of excess medicines from other approved European wholesalers. The drugs are then packed on in Poland, for example, and sold to Swedish pharmacies.

According to a report by the MPA, the many the middlemen the increase the risk of counterfeits to reach Swedish customers.
Products are assessed according to how the package looks like, manufacturing codes and distinct appearance.
But Swedish importers do not have their own routine checks of medicinal content.
By Scancomark.se Team

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