As reported in SecuringPharma.com, a healthcare advocacy group in the Philippines is taking issue with the government's stance on counterfeit medicines, claiming that its policies are exacerbating the problem.
The advocacy group, Samahan Lavansa Pekeng Gamot, claims that percentage of fake drugs within the Phillipines is three times higher than the government claim of 10% according to a report in the Malay Business Insight.
According to the SecuringPharma story:
· Samahan claims that counterfeits make up around 60 billion pesos ($1.3bn) of the 200 billion peso Philippines pharmaceutical market, and that the situation is made worse by parallel imports of medicine and the actions of some of the government-run Biotika retail outlets.
· The 16,300 Biotika stores in the Philippines have problems restocking medicines from the Department of Health and this encourages them to source medicines from elsewhere, creating a potential entry point for counterfeits into the supply chain. They also tend to stock a wide range of medicines, despite only being supposed to offer a limited list of 42 essential medicines.
The Philippines is a classic example of a pharmaceutical supply chain whose members are not either properly regulated or commercially incentivized to protect its inventories and ultimately the consumers.
With a supply chain inundated with 10-30% of its medications that are fraudulent, adulterated, sub-standard or counterfeit the financial and human toll on the society and its healthcare system is immeasurable.
The deployment of a bundle of solutions and technologies, including material authentication within the supply chain is an easy solution to protect both the financial and physical well being of the population.
To read the entire SecuringPharma story, visit: http://www.securingpharma.com/40/articles/541.php
To learn more about anti-counterfeiting technologies, visit: http://www.xstreamsystems.net/.
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