A quarter of UK doctors ‘have treated counterfeiting casualties'

A survey carried out by UK medical newspaper GP has found a staggering 25 per cent of doctors in the country have treated at least one patient for side effects caused by medicines bought online.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the headline statistic, 85 per cent of the 423 doctors surveyed said they believed that online pharmacies should be more tightly regulated.

Concerns about buying medicines on the Internet were borne out by a survey conducted by the European Alliance for Access to Safe Medicines (EAASM) last June, which found 62 per cent of medicines purchased online were fake or substandard, and that nearly 96 per cent of online pharmacies were operating outside the law.

Jim Thomson, chair of the EAASM, told SecuringPharma.com: “in excess of 95 per cent of online drug sellers have nothing to do with healthcare and everything to do with income generation.” 

“It is money laundering on the grand scale and organised crime on global scale.”

2.25 million online purchasers

Research indicates that over 2.25 million UK citizens buy prescription medicines online, and with nearly two-thirds of those purchases likely to be counterfeit this suggests that Internet presents a real and present public health danger.

Although European Union legislation does not prohibit the sale of medicines over the Internet, there is leeway for Member State governments to place their own restrictions on the practice.

Some member states - notably France and Spain - officially ban the practice even though enforcement is very difficult; A search on Google France, for example, reveals there is no shortage of websites advertising medicines in the French language.

The UK, along with other countries such as the Netherlands and Germany, permits Internet medicine sales. However all pharmacies - including those providing online sales - must be registered with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB).

Once registered they can sport a logo (pictured below), carrying the pharmacy's registration number which can be checked via the RPSGB's online database.


However, the society acknowledges that even with this in place it is still difficult for members of the public to differentiate the legal and illegal pharmacies.

"While a number of legitimate registered pharmacies provide online pharmacy services, there are also a number of suppliers operating from websites offering to sell medicines who have no professional qualifications or healthcare expertise," according to the RPSGB.

The society said it has been "working with the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to encourage the public to buy medicines in the safest way and to raise awareness of counterfeit medicine and its dangers."

As part of that effort the RPSGB has prepared a leaflet designed to be added to patient prescription bags for medicines, such as Pfizer's Viagra (sildenafil) for erectile dysfunction, that are known to carry a high risk of counterfeiting.

The postcard-style leaflet will start distribution at the end of April and will "give advice to patients on what counterfeit medicine is, how to minimise the risk of buying fakes and what to do if they think they've been sold counterfeits," according to RPSGB's director of policy David Pruce.