

Several unscrupulous drugmakers have given their herbal erection pills a pinch of special ingredients – chemicals that are terrifyingly similar to real Viagra and Levitra. Dutch public health scientists caught them while analyzing a batch of seized pharmaceuticals.

In a report to Forensic Science International, which became available on Feb. 21, Dries de Kaste and his team explained that each of the shady products includes unnatural chemicals that are not listed on their labels.

Since none of those molecules have been tested in rigorous safety studies, and each can affect the cardiovascular system or interact with other drugs, they are quite dangerous.

At the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the

Environment in Bilthoven, de Kaste and his colleagues tested the confiscated medications with an HPLC mass spectrometer, which is a classic tool for forensic science. Simply put, it can separate out each chemical in a complicated mixture and then identify them individually.

When several unusual molecules showed up in their initial screen, the scientists did some further analysis with a Nuclear Magnetic

Resonance spectrometer. It can give detailed information about the shape and composition of a chemical. Using that instrument, de Kaste and his colleagues verified that they had indeed found molecules which are very similar to prescription erectile dysfunction drugs, but not quite the same. When the researchers purified and tested the synthetic additives on a phosphodiesterase enzyme, the protein which erection pills affect, they learned that each of the phony medications was nearly as strong as the approved ones.

Toward the end of their report, the regulatory scientists speculated that unethical drugmakers read the patent literature for Viagra and Levitra and then intentionally brewed molecules that are quite similar.

So far, at least one manufacturer has faced the firm hand of the law. The makers of Libidfit were taken to court and their product was blacklisted. But punishing one company is not enough, de Kaste and his team think that the government should be hard on all of the unethical businesses. He suggested that each of the suspicious products should be pulled from the market.

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