By Filipe Rufino - 11th April 2007
The fight against counterfeit medicines has now become the new global war on drugs, leading experts have told MEPs.
The counterfeit medicines market has emerged as a multi-billion euro business with profit margins rivalling those of hard drug trafficking, according to the latest WHO estimates.
Around ten percent of medicines traded worldwide are substandard fakes, with the figure rising up to more than 50 per cent in some developing countries.
Counterfeiters traffic pills ranging from lifestyle drugs such as Viagra to commonplace third world medicines such as anti-malarials.
Selling a fake medicine is not the same as selling a fake Gucci bag as the consumer is unaware of the risk to his or her health, said Valerio Reggi, head of the WHO’s taskforce for fake drugs at a public hearing in the European parliament on Tuesday.
Trafficking counterfeit medicines is “a murderous attack on the sick... perpetrated against trusting, vulnerable, unsuspecting people”.
Most counterfeit drugs end up in the developing world where border controls are less stringent, said Christophe Zimmermann of the World customs organisation.
“How on earth can you expect a customs official in Burkina Faso on duty at three o’clock in the morning to know if these perfectly packaged pills are fakes,” he asked MEPs while he held out a seized fake Viagra blister pack in his hand.
But the developing world is launching its own war on the fakes, as Gloria Akunyili, director-general of Nigeria’s national agency for food and drug control, told MEPs.
Akunyili, a trained pharmacologist who lost her sister to a fake insulin shot, ordered a crackdown on the counterfeits when she took office in 2001, arresting thousands of dealers including her brother-in-law and corrupt officials from her agency.
Under her leadership Nigeria has managed to cut the share of counterfeit medicines in the market place from the official figure of 41 per cent in 2001 – when it was singled out by the WHO as the world’s least safe country to buy medicines - to an estimated 16 per cent in 2006, she said.
The outspoken Nigerian’s hard line approach has placed her at the heart of a bitter feud with the country’s counterfeit mafias.
She has survived assassination attempts and is now surrounded by bodyguards wherever she goes.
“We cannot bring it (the traffic in counterfeit medicines) down to zero in the same way that you cannot bring crime down to zero, but I believe we can bring it down to an acceptable level, say, 0.1 per cent - we can do that, it is possible”, she told this website.
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