Bitter pills

Abstract

Growing problemThese incidents are almost certainly an underestimate of the extent of the traffic in counterfeit drugs in the United Kingdom. Although the agency conducts spot checks, it has limited resources to tackle a problem that has been acknowledged only relatively recently.One indicator is European Union customs statistics, which showed a fourfold increase last year with 497 border seizures of 2.7 million medicines.4 Although lifestyle drugs such as Viagra dominated, the hauls also included significant numbers of drugs to treat hypercholesterolaemia, osteoporosis, and hypertension. Similar increases have been reported in the United States.But in Europe and North America, the issue remains modest. The US Food and Drug Administration's counterfeit drug task force argued last year that extensive oversight meant the problem was still “quite rare,” although it stressed that the drug supply was “increasingly vulnerable to a variety of increasingly sophisticated threats.”5Estimates issued last year by the World Health Organization's international medical products anti-counterfeiting taskforce (IMPACT), which draws together regulators, manufacturers, police, and other specialists, suggested that fakes represented less than 1% of all medicines in the industrialised world.6 7 However, it said that around 10% of the global market was fake, rising to 30% in some parts of the developing world. A recent analysis of artemisinin group drugs for malaria in Kenya and Congo showed nearly a third were fake, rising to 77% for injectable forms.8