All Posts Tagged With: "counterfeit drugs"
Partnerka, Counterfeit Drugs and the New Counterfeit Spam
Marvin D. Shepherd, PhD Shepherd
The Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM) has long reported on the growing issue of pharmaceutical spam advertising—and now SophosLab Canada has taken a closer look at the solicitation of counterfeit products online.
According to their new report, “The Partnerka: What Is it and Why Should You Care?,” one of the most influential counterfeit networks are the Russian partnerka, which are comprised of hundreds of well-organized spammer affiliate networks that fan out across the world—all working to drive as much traffic to partner sites (and stores) as possible.
And while today’s email services have anti-spam filters to help protect our inboxes, the Internet offers many other ways for the partnerka to peddle their counterfeits, including blogs, online forums and social networking sites.
In addition to buying advertisements on these platforms, spammers employ black hat search engine optimization methods to promote their Web sites and position them in front of Web users conducting searches on similar items. These techniques include creating Web sites that trick search engines into thinking they contain helpful content to Web searchers, as well posting spam messages on blogs, message boards and social networking sites—which are not subject to the same legal and technological requirements as their email counterparts.
As technology changes, so too do the tactics of unscrupulous counterfeit drug peddlers. The PSM reminds Web users to be wary of Web sites or Internet advertisements that promise cheap prescription drugs without physician authorization.
Read the rest of this article here .
Crackdown targets counterfeit drugs
Excerpt from The Washington Post …
New York, Nov 20 - Crackdown targets counterfeit drugs
RAIDS HELD WORLDWIDE
Fake medicines a growing enterprise
By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 20, 2009
NEW YORK — In highly orchestrated raids around the world this week, Interpol officers in Europe, drug agents in the United States and task forces from Sweden to Singapore hunted down counterfeit prescription drugs in an effort to stem a rapidly growing criminal business preying on financially pressed consumers looking for bargains.
The operation, code-named Pangea, is expected to be disclosed Friday in an effort to put fraudulent businesses on notice that police around the world are fighting back against what has become a $28 million industry in the United States alone.
The national crackdown uncovered nearly 800 alleged packages of fake or suspicious prescription drugs including Viagra, Vicodin, and Claritin, and shut down 68 alleged rogue online pharmacies. Some counterfeit drugs may have as much as three times more of an active ingredient than is typically prescribed; others may be placebos. Drywall material, antifreeze and yellow highway paint have been found in counterfeit pills.
Read the rest of this article on counterfeit drugs and efforts to put counterfeiters behind bars.
The Fatal Consequences of Counterfeit Drugs
In Southeast Asia, forensic investigators using cutting-edge tools are helping stanch the deadly trade in fake anti-malaria drugs
By Andrew Marshall
Smithsonian magazine, October 2009
In Battambang, Cambodia, a western province full of poor farmers barely managing to grow enough rice to live on, the top government official charged with fighting malaria is Ouk Vichea. His job—contending with as many as 10,000 malaria cases a year in an area twice as large as Delaware—is made even more challenging by ruthless, increasingly sophisticated criminals, whose handiwork Ouk Vichea was about to demonstrate.
Standing in his cluttered lab only a few paces wide in the provincial capital, also called Battambang, he held up a small plastic bag containing two identical blister packs labeled artesunate, a powerful antimalarial. One was authentic. The other? “It’s 100 percent flour,” he said. “Before, I could tell with my eyes if they were good or bad. Now, it’s impossible.”
The problem that Ouk Vichea was illustrating is itself a scourge threatening hundreds of thousands of people, a plague that seems all the more cruel because it is brought on by cold, calculated greed. Southeast Asia is awash in counterfeit medications, none more insidious than those for malaria, a deadly infectious disease that is usually curable if treated early with appropriate drugs. Pharmacies throughout the region are stocked with the fake malaria medicine, which is generally cheaper than the real thing.
Artesunate, developed by Chinese scientists in the 1970s, is a leading antimalaria drug. Its active ingredient, artemisinin, comes from the wormwood plant, which ancient Chinese herbalists prized for its fever-reducing properties. Between 1999 and 2003, medical researchers conducted two surveys in which they randomly purchased artesunate from pharmacies in Cambodia, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. The volume of fake pills rose from 38 percent to 53 percent.
“This is a very, very serious criminal act,” Nicholas White, a malaria expert at Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand, says of the counterfeiting. “You’re killing people. It’s premeditated, coldblooded murder. And yet we don’t think of it like that.”
Nobody knows the full scope of the crime, although the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that counterfeit drugs are associated with up to 20 percent of the one million malaria deaths worldwide each year. Reliable statistics in Southeast Asia are hard to come by, partly because the damage seldom arouses suspicion and because victims tend to be poor people who receive inadequate medical treatment to begin with.
That dimension of the problem was made clear to me by Chem Srey Mao, a 30-year-old farm laborer in Pailin, Cambodia. She said she had been sick with malaria for two weeks before she finally visited the district’s main health clinic, a one-story building with a handful of rooms. She had been dosing herself with painkillers so she could work in the fields, sometimes collapsing in the afternoon with fevers and chills. “I needed the money for medicine and food,” she said. “I had to work.”
The most afflicted populations live in remote, rural areas and have limited access to health facilities. An estimated 70 percent of malaria patients in Cambodia seek treatment at local village vendors, who don’t have the expertise or resources to distinguish real pills from counterfeits.
“The first time they get sick they go to a private clinic or small pharmacy,” Ouk Vichea says. “Only when it’s severe do they go to the hospital.” And then it’s often too late.
Read the rest of this Smithsonian Magazine article on counterfeit drugs.
The new “Spamalot” – Spam Solicitations for Counterfeit Drugs
On October 13, a USA Today article featured a report released from the antivirus company McAfee. They found that 70 percent of spam in September was from websites advertizing “Canadian pharmaceuticals.” Further, the only thing that made it “Canadian” was the word Canadian and the maple leaves on the spammers’ web page. The increase in counterfeit drug spam may be due to the rising fears surrounding H1N1 flu, as well as the intensity around the topic of healthcare costs.
The Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM) often warns consumers to stay away from unlicensed online pharmacies, but do consumers to do when they are flooded with emails from seemingly legitimate online pharmacies promising lower drug prices? The answer lays in being smart when looking for ways to save. Although promises of low-cost prescription drugs are attractive, PSM reminds consumers to remain wary of online pharmacies–always making sure that the Web site is on the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy’s (NABP) list of Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites (VIPPS).
Consumers should look for the key warning signs of a counterfeit online pharmacy as outlined in our Consumer Resources guide, including:
- No physical address or telephone number is listed on the Web site
- Does not have a licensed pharmacist available to answer your questions
- Does not have any way for you to talk to a person if you have problems
- Does not ask for the name, address, or phone number of your current doctor
- Does not require a valid prescription issued by your healthcare practitioner
- Sells you a prescription or asks you to fill out a questionnaire to receive a prescription
Read more on what consumer should look for to spot counterfeit drugs .
Counterfeit Drugs on the Partnership for Safe Medicines Blog
Learn more about the topic of counterfeit drugs from the Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM). PSM is a group of organizations and individuals that have policies, procedures, or programs to protect consumers from counterfeit or contraband medicines.
Turkish Government to Delay Implementation of Barcode System to Stamp Out Counterfeit Drugs
- Turkey is identified as being one of the largest global purveyors of counterfeit drugs.
- The ambitious tracking system, which industry insiders estimate has already cost more than $200 million this year alone in the run-up to its implementation, has been fraught with difficulties.
Read the rest of this article on Turkey’s efforts to “stamp out” counterfeit drugs.
Counterfeit Drugs
Prescription medications are one of the most valuable weapons we have in our health care arsenal today. Because of their value, medications are highly susceptible to counterfeiting. Counterfeit drugs are illegal, unsafe, and pose a serious threat to public health. Increasing the safety and security of the U.S. drug supply, and protecting it from the increasing threat of counterfeit drugs is critically important.
›› APhA Issue Brief on DEA Updates Issue Brief 03/2009
›› Counterfeit Medications Issue Brief 03/2009
›› APhA Summary of California Law on Pedigree Requirement for Prescription Medications 11/2008
›› APhA Comments to DEA on Order Form 222 07/2008
Find additional resources from Pharmacist.com on counterfeit drugs.
How to Stop the Counterfeit-Medicine Drugs Trade
The next time you’re tempted to buy Viagra, Lipitor or some other medication online, ponder this: there’s a high likelihood that what you buy will be fake. The pill or vaccine may contain a much smaller dosage than stated, or it may lack any active ingredient whatsoever. Worst of all, it could be toxic. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 50% of drugs sold online have either been falsified or altered in some way. And Internet sales are just the tip of a much bigger problem. Falsified medicines are especially prevalent in developing countries; the WHO estimates that up to 30% of drugs sold in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America are fake, including ones used to fight diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.
The issue has long been a preoccupation of major pharmaceutical companies, which lose as much as $75 billion in business every year to counterfeit-drug makers, according to WHO estimates. In 2002, the industry set up a Washington-based agency called the Pharmaceutical Security Industry, run by Thomas Kubic, a former FBI deputy assistant director, to try to tackle the problem. And four years later, the WHO launched an international task force dedicated to the issue. But so far, such efforts have merely highlighted the growing trade. The Pharmaceutical Security Industry tracked more than 1,800 incidents of drug-counterfeiting around the world last year, 10 times the number when it first started monitoring seven years ago. Getting governments and law enforcers around the world to work more effectively to counter the problem has proved hard.
But that may be starting to change. On Monday, the Presidents of two African countries, Thomas Boni Yayi of Benin and Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso, will be among a cluster of international dignitaries and industry experts who will make an international call for action against counterfeit drugs in Cotonou, Benin. The initiative is the brainchild of Jacques Chirac, the former French President, who wants to make the Cotonou declaration the first step of a worldwide campaign aimed at raising awareness of the problem and persuading governments to impose tougher penalties and improve routine testing of medications. The larger goal is to establish an international convention on counterfeit drugs as early as next year. Marc Gentilini, a French medical professor and expert on tropical diseases who is advising Chirac, says the problem is urgent. The lack of clear international rules governing counterfeit medicines, he says, means that trafficking them is currently "less risky and more lucrative than trafficking narcotics."
Read the rest of this Time article on what the pharmaceutical industry is doing to curb counterfeit drugs .
Did You Ever Wonder Why People Buy Counterfeit Drugs?
Last month, the Wall Street Journal featured an article that discussed the efforts currently underway to deter people from buying counterfeit products. It pointed out that many anti-counterfeiting messages fail to address the underlying motivation which leads people to buy counterfeit products.
The authors surveyed people in the United States, Brazil, China, India, and Russia. They asked consumers to consider and rank five factors that may influence their decision to buy counterfeit drugs or a pirated movie – quality, cost, sentiment, ethics and ease of purchase.
Not surprisingly, the researchers received very different responses from the survey participants as to “why they would buy a fake DVD” versus “why they would buy a counterfeit drug.” But overall, the authors found consumers would buy a fake because:
- they thought it was just as good as a legitimate product;
- they could not afford the genuine product;
- they do not like the big businesses that make the authentic products;
- they do not think it is illegal or immoral to do so; and/or,
- the products were easy to obtain.
Read the rest of this article on counterfeit drugs .
Counterfeit malaria drugs kill thousands in Africa
MediaGlobal (a global news agency, based in the United Nations Secretariat) recently reported on the WHO’s increasing efforts to combat counterfeit medications in Africa — and the deadly impact of these fakes.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has stepped up their efforts to combat the creation and distribution of counterfeit malaria pills in Africa. WHO estimates that upwards of 2,000 children a day are being killed as a result of taking these phony medications. Dr. Lembit Rago, Coordinator of WHO Essential Medicines and Pharmaceutical Policies, told MediaGlobal, “Usually products in high demand, price or sizeable market are counterfeited; malaria drugs fulfill all these criteria…[Counterfeit malaria pills] may contain no active ingredients, may contain wrong active ingredients or even correct active ingredients.”
There is usually a low amount of active ingredient, like the pain reliever paracetamol, in fake malaria medications, according to Rago, in order to “cheat qualitative screening tests that just react to the presence of certain actives, and thus may mimic false positive results." The ingredient may soothe malaria symptoms temporarily, but the disease remains unaffected. It is also possible that counterfeit drugs contain harmful or strange chemicals, like sildenafil, normally contained in the anti-impotency drug known as Viagra. Rago continued to say that, since malaria kills, counterfeit pills that provide no treatment "kill as well".
Low quantities of actives can also contribute to raising resistance and losing valuable drugs in the long term." As far as steps being taken to combat this practice, Rago reported, "There is no one magic bullet. It is a complexity of measures and cooperation of all concerned parties that works the best. The key is effective market control and functioning regulatory systems, including good cooperation between different enforcement agencies."
Read this article on counterfeit drugs on the Patients and Patents blog.