Counterfeiters are a crack in the European pharmaceutical channel security: intra-EU imports of medicines, which increase the number of intermediaries. The union uses the technology to trace and verify their legal products, one by one, their authenticity
It is difficult to know the actual figures to be an illegal and clandestine business, but the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that counterfeit drugs may represent 10% of the global medicines market, although with important geographical differences. While in some developing countries the incidence of frauds over 50% due to the lack of regulation and control, in industrialized nations, with formal supply systems would be reduced to 1%. Internet is the highway by which these products have circulated in the rich regions, but the trafficking mafias have set their sights on the legal pharmaceutical channel. In recent months several counterfeits have been detected that have managed to circumvent the strict European safety systems.
They were made in China, were labeled in France, traveled by boat to Singapore and ended his trip to Liverpool (United Kingdom). So last year introduced a line of prescription antipsychotic Zyprexa, which is used as a treatment for schizophrenia in the British system of health. The British island is one of the main destinations of increasingly sophisticated drug trafficking mafias forged.
Throughout 2008, their customs intercepted fraudulent products to treat cardiovascular disease and cancer on a value close to three and a half million euros. Some of the seized shipment contained more than 100,000 pills, ready to infiltrate the legal channel of distribution. These cases have the alarm bells ringing in European nations, who have discovered with astonishment how their system of monitoring and control of the pharmaceutical market is not as invulnerable as assumed.