Click to a pharmacy online, the internet has a host of medicines and pills for sale but many of them are fake. Around a hundred countries have taken part in an operation coordinated by Interpol to stamp out the illegal operation. Medicines are often cheaper online but you can pay a high price with your health. Brigitte Mouraret a pharmacist in the French city of Lyon explained one of the reasons for buying through the internet. “There are people who buy on the internet because they do not dare to talk about their problems at the pharmacy, but there is no security as to the quality of what they will buy,” she said. According to the World Health Organisation 50 to 80% of drugs on the internet are fake. This operation called Pangea VI has resulted in 58 arrests, the closure of internet sites and the seizure of millions of potentially dangerous medicines. Aline Plancon Head of Pharmaceutical Crime Unit at Interpol gave specific figures. “We have shut down more than 10,000 illegal pharmacy sites online and taken almost 10 million medicines.” Buying online offers no guarantees as to the safety of the drugs. The sales are not policed and there is often no indication of what is actually in the medicine. “Evidence suggests the counterfeit medicines that we’ve seized contain no active ingredients; little ingredients or the wrong ingredients. The key message is that using these medicines is dangerous.” Ten percent of drugs in the world are fake and it is big business with huge profits 58 billion euros were the profits three years ago. On an investment of one thousand euros a criminal can increase that figure twenty times if it is invested in heroin but put it into fake medicines and that figure soars to 400,000 euros. Our correspondent Laurence Alexandrowicz says: “According to the World Health Organisation in most industrialised countries, where there are checks, the incidence of counterfeit drugs is low, less than one percent of the market value. But in other countries, such as South America, Asia and especially Africa fake drugs account for twenty to thirty percent of the market.”

Counterfeit medications are a growing global pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of people a year, warn health scientists.

A series of 17 new studies found that as much as 41 per cent of some of the 17,000 drug samples tested from all over the world failed to meet quality standards.

The repercussions are all too real.

Substandard malaria drugs are believed to have killed an estimated 122,350 children in African in 2013, the research says.

And while fakes are found largely in low- and middle-income countries, western patients are not immune.

“Although previously thought to be limited to low-income countries with weak pharmaceutical regulatory systems and problems with anti-malarials, increasing reports of a large variety of poor-quality medicines and medicinal products, such as vitamin supplements, in high- and middle-income economies are illustrative of the pandemic nature of this problem,” says the summary article of the special report published this week in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.



Canadian problem as well



Indeed, during a one-week operation last year RCMP and Canada Border Services seized 1,869 packages containing nearly 139,000 illicit and fake pharmaceutical products with a street value of $627,000.

The counterfeit products included erectile dysfunction pills, anti-depressants, cancer drugs, anti-psychotics, female sex hormones and ACE inhibitors.

In a similar sweep the year before, the two agencies found 3,223 packages containing 238,820 illicit and fake medicines worth more than $1 million.

“Counterfeit pharmaceuticals is one of the world’s fastest growing illicit industries,” RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson said at the time. “As the organized crime groups behind this emerging threat become more and more sophisticated, it is all the more critical for the RCMP to continue strengthening its domestic and international partnerships to stop the flow of these illegal and dangerous products into Canada.”

The RCMP action was part of an international operation spanning 111 countries that resulted in 237 arrests and seizure of nearly 9.5 million pharmaceutical products worth US$36 million.

Ten years ago, RCMP seized illegal pharmaceuticals at a Kingston, Ont., pharmacy and charged the owner with 12 criminal offences including the sale of fake and non-approved drugs.

The pharmacist was acquitted but a subsequent investigation by the coroner into the deaths of 11 pharmacy patients found that the fake drugs could not be ruled out as the cause of four of those deaths.

A couple of years later, a B.C. coroner found that a Vancouver Island woman had died of metal toxicity from counterfeit drugs she’d purchased online.

For the 17-study series published by the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, scientists inspected the quality of about 16,800 samples of anti-malarials, anti-tuberculosis medicines, antibiotics and anti-leishmaniasis drugs purchased all over the world, including Africa, Asia and the United Kingdom.

They found between nine and 41 per cent of the drugs in separate studies failed to meet quality specifications. Some were poor quality and some were just fake.

Joel Alleyne, former executive director of the Canadian Health Care Anti-Fraud Association and consultant on the issue, says the profits can be enormous.

“If you’re selling drywall dust in the shape of a pill, then your profits are better than the pharmaceutical manufacturer’s profits,” he tells Yahoo Canada News.

He’s seen dyed chalk and drywall dust pawned off as pharmaceutical drugs.

Alleyne says consumers should buy prescription drugs at reputable pharmacies and be vigilant. Consider the packaging, spelling, taste and whether the prescription is in any way different than in the past.

The research team says techniques for detecting fraudulent pharmaceutical products have improved and they would like a global agreement akin to the international convention on tobacco control.

They also urge individual countries to enact stricter laws to prosecute those involved in counterfeit medicines.