Pharmaceuticals: Bad medicine

The trade in counterfeit medicine is flourishing around the world, bringing losses to the producers and posing a threat to patients' lives, industry representatives warned last week at a conference on safety in the pharmaceutical trade.

The global market for counterfeit medicine is growing by 13 percent annually and is expected to reach €65 (zł.222.5) billion in 2010, according to EU data. These products may constitute up to 10 percent of all medicines in developed countries and up to 50 percent in developing ones, the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute's data shows.

"The problem is all the more serious since the medicines being counterfeited are increasingly those used to save lives, not just the so-called 'lifestyle drugs,'" Zdzisław Sabiłło, the head of the Employers' Union of Innovative Pharmaceutical Companies said.

Poland is not free from this problem, although the wholesale distribution system has high safety standards, by Polish as well as EU measures, according to the experts.

"The Polish wholesale system guarantees security from counterfeit medicines, but the biggest danger lies in what happens [before or after] the wholesale phase," stressed Andrzej Stachnik of the Association of Pharmaceutical Wholesale Employers.

According to Stachnik, the threat lies in other stages of distribution, such as retail and import, especially intra-EU import. Therefore the experts called for legal regulations which would provide a coherent and unified system of controls at the EU level.

"We need a coordinated system of inspections in all the stages of pharmaceutical distribution, to make the system resistant [to counterfeiting] and facilitate the flow of information," said Chief Pharmaceutical Inspector Zofia Ulz.

The pharmaceutical market in Poland was valued at zł.21.5 billion last year, representing a y/y growth of 5.9 percent, according to pharmaceutical market research firm PharmaExpert.