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...which lose as much as $75 billion in business every year to counterfeit-drug makers, according to WHO estimates. In 2002, the industry set up a Washington-based agency called the Pharmaceutical Security Industry, run by Thomas Kubic, a former FBI deputy assistant director, to try to tackle the problem. And four years later, the WHO launched an international task force dedicated to the issue. But so far, such efforts have merely highlighted the growing trade. The Pharmaceutical Security Industry tracked more than 1,800 incidents of drug-counterfeiting around the world last year, 10 times the number when...
...industry experts who will make an international call for action against counterfeit drugs in Cotonou, Benin. The initiative is the brainchild of Jacques Chirac, the former French President, who wants to make the Cotonou declaration the first step of a worldwide campaign aimed at raising awareness of the problem and persuading governments to impose tougher penalties and improve routine testing of medications. The larger goal is to establish an international convention on counterfeit drugs as early as next year. Marc Gentilini, a French medical professor and expert on tropical diseases who is advising Chirac, says the problem is urgent...
...problem is not limited to poor countries, however. When Pfizer recalled 120,000 packs of its cholesterol drug Lipitor in Britain in 2005 after it discovered a counterfeit version, it found that 60% of all the returned packs were fakes. Jacques Franquet, who heads security operations for the French drugmaker Sanofi Aventis, says his teams routinely find fake versions of about 15 of the company's drugs worldwide...
...major pharmaceutical companies have been at the forefront of the campaign to crack down on the problem. All have growing security divisions that track illegal medicine-trafficking and gather evidence to give to law-enforcement agencies to help them take action. Pfizer has also started experimenting with safer packaging. For example, all its Viagra blockbuster packs in the U.S. now have a radio-frequency-identification tag. Merck, meanwhile, is funding the distribution of minilabs to developing countries to improve detection of fake ingredients in drugs used to combat malaria, HIV and tuberculosis...
...experts say governments also need to step up enforcement of laws in order to effectively tackle the problem. The U.S. and Britain have special police units to deal with falsified medication, but most other countries lag behind, Franquet says. Kubic says that political efforts to fight the problem have flagged in recent years, mainly because countries like India and Brazil fear that the large amounts of generic drugs they produce legally may be mistakenly targeted in a global crackdown on fake-drug-trafficking. (Read "Are Direct-to-Consumer Drug Ads Doomed...