SecuringPharma: Medicine Seizures by EU Customs Rise Again in 2009

Phil Taylor in a July 23rd post in SecuringPharma.com writes about the increase in the seizure of pharmaceuticals from 2008 to 2009.

Although overall there were fewer detained shipments from 2008 to 2009 apparently “the downturn did not extend to medicinal products”.

Also in the blog, Mr. Taylor adds some curious statistics as to what countries lead the way in originating and presumably supplying many of the interdicted medications.

It would appear that the criminal elements behind counterfeiting must be realizing the high profit and low risk associated with pharmaceutical counterfeiting which means a far higher risk to consumers everywhere.

Secure Pharma Chain encourages all regulatory and pharmaceutical supply chain members utilize solutions and technologies such as XStream Systems’ XT250 to authenticate and secure supply chain transactions and inventories to protect the end use consumers.

Here are some of the highlights and interesting statistics from Mr. Taylor’s post:

· Customs officers in the European Union detained fewer shipments suspected of infringing intellectual property rights in 2009 compared to 2008, but sadly that downturn did not extend to medicinal products.

· Overall medicines accounted for around 10 per cent of all the 118 million articles intercepted by EU customs last year, and 8 per cent of the 43,500 individual cases.

· In absolute terms, the number of seized medical products rose to around 11.5 million from a little under 9 million in 2008, which in turn was double the number in 2007.

· The origins of the intercepted medicine shipments also makes interesting reading with 74 per cent of the articles coming from United Arab Emirates - a well-known hub for goods in transit from other markets into the EU - and 23 per cent coming from India.

· China featured highly among other industrial sectors such as apparel and electronics, but was the source in just 1.4 per cent of medicinal product detentions. The only other country of origin worth mentioning was Syria, with around 1 per cent of the total.

To read SecuringPharma’s post, visit: http://www.securingpharma.com/40/articles/532.php.

To learn more about supply chain security technologies, visit: http://www.xstreamsystems.net/.