Public Health Measures to Fight Counterfeit Medicine Market

DEAR EDITOR, World Health Organization defines a counterfeit medicine as the one which is deliberately and fraudulently mislabeled with respect to identity and/ or source. It incorporates both branded and generic products and even includes products with correct/ wrong/insufficient/no active ingredients, or fake packaging. However, the European Union has proposed falsified medicines as a more appropriate term than counterfeit medicines, which actually refers to those medicines that are not compliant with the intellectual‐property rights or that infringe trademark law. Counterfeiting in pharmaceutical products has resulted in serious health repercussions such as no relief/partial relief from complaints, development of adverse drug effects, multiple unintended drug interactions and economic burden on the health care delivery system. Findings of a systematic review revealed that the prevalence of counterfeit drugs is high throughout Africa and Asia in lower income countries and lower middle‐income countries. Although, no single country is immune to the problem, the manner in which countries have been affected is variable ranging from production and trade of illegal medicines in developing countries and consumption of fake drugs by consumer in developed countries. However, amidst Department of Community Medicine, Shri Sathya Sai Medical College and Research Institute, Ammapettai, Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu, India Correspondence to: Dr. Saurabh RamBihariLal Shrivastava, Department of Community Medicine, 3rd Floor, Shri Sathya Sai Medical College and Research Institute, Thiruporur‐Guduvancherry Main Road, Ammapettai, Kanchipuram ‐ 603 108, Tamil Nadu, India. E‐mail: [email protected] Date of Submission: Oct 05, 2013