Show caption The packets of 15mg and 45mg pills found by a Swiss wholesaler contain only paracetamol. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA Cancer WHO warns of fake cancer drug made from paracetamol Pills that resemble Leukaemia drug Iclusig sold in Europe and Americas for £5,000 a pack Sarah Boseley Tue 12 Feb 2019 12.50 GMT Share on Facebook

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A global alert has been issued by the World Health Organization, warning patients, doctors and pharmacies of a fake cancer drug circulating in Europe and the Americas.

The fake medicine is packaged to look like the cancer drug Iclusig, which contains the active ingredient ponatinib to treat adults with chronic myeloid leukaemia and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. The labels are in English, as if destined for use in the NHS. The boxes of 15mg and 45mg pills contain only paracetamol.

“There’s no active ingredient so it’s a really high value product,” said Michael Deats, who leads the vigilance group on fake medicines at WHO in Geneva. “It’s dangerous. We’re concerned about this one.”

The drug was “slightly unusual” because it was made solely of paracetamol. Deats said although it is more common to see falsified or ineffective antibiotics and antimalarials, reports of fake cancer drugs are not infrequent.

“We see breast cancer, prostate cancer, leukaemia products being reported with some regularity, unfortunately, from all regions,” he said.

The fake drugs in packs of 30 x 45mg tablets and 60 x 15mg tablets aroused the suspicions of a wholesaler in Switzerland. The Swiss health authorities then informed the WHO and lab analysis confirmed that the pills were fake.

Deats said the market would be people with cancer and their families in countries where the drug was not made available for free or who did not have enough health insurance to pay for it.

“If you are involved in the manufacture and distribution of this falsified version, you are going to be making it available on the internet to people in countries that haven’t got an NHS and it’s not subsidised,” he said.

“This one is being picked up by patients in other parts of the world and it’s people who are desperate to get a medicine to treat their disease and they’re getting paracetamol.”

The drug is expensive, priced at around £5,000 a pack in the UK in 2017 and currently around $13,500 – or $450 a pill – in the US.

Deats said there was a risk, although very slight, that it could get into the NHS. Medicines are sometimes legally bought by UK pharmacies for NHS use from other countries where they are on sale at a cheaper price – a practice called parallel trading. Everybody needs to be on the alert, he said.