Today, the UK MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) announced biggest haul of counterfeit and unlicensed medicines in the agency’s history – almost double its total for 2014!
The recent seizures were worth £15.8 million and apparently include “huge quantities of illegally supplied and potentially harmful slimming pills, erectile dysfunction tablets, anaemia tablets and narcolepsy tablets.” They also found and removed a quantity of unlicensed foreign medicines and fake condoms.
The UK seizure comprised almost 6.2 million doses of falsified, counterfeit and unlicensed medicines, 15,000 of which were medical devices. The UK operation also resulted in 1,380 websites being closed down, 339 of which were domestic sites.
‘Operation Pangea’ was initiated by the MHRA in 2006. The latest, Operation Pangea VIII, was coordinated through INTERPOL and concluded with a week of international raids between 9th and 16th June that resulted in 156 arrests worldwide. In total, the crackdown on illegal internet drug trading yielded £51.6 million worth of items from 115 different countries globally.
The advice to the public and pharmacists is simple, and is spelt out in the online training course in Good Distribution Practice.
“The quality of falsified goods varies, but nowadays many of them are very good copies of the original product and it can be extremely hard to tell counterfeits apart from the original product. It is vitally important that personnel involved in distribution are aware of the risks of falsified goods entering the supply chain and are trained appropriately to look out for indicators that medicinal products may not be genuine. There is an expectation that documentation is in place to indicate how distributors will achieve this awareness.”
Click here to download a simple guide to recognising the majority of counterfeit medicines…
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