Substandard and Fake Drugs need to be Eradicated

The Institute of Medicine announced on Wednesday that the fight against fake drugs would need a chain of custody to be put in place for medications like those that the courts in the U.S. require for any evidence used at a trial.

The call for the need of a tracking system to track drugs nationally follows a warning from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that it had discovered counterfeit Avastin, the cancer drug. The fake drug discovered by the FDA lacked the active ingredient that kills tumors.

Substandard and fake drugs are more and more a concern as pharmaceutical companies from the U.S. move more manufacturing overseas. That risk made the headlines during 2008, when patients in the U.S. died after using a blood thinner imported from China that had been contaminated.

The new report from the IOM was clear that the problem is global and requires a response internationally, with developing countries the ones especially at a risk from the substandard and fake medications. For example, tuberculosis that is drug-resistant is fueled partially by medications that are watered down and sold in many of the poorer countries.

The IOM said a drug tracking system that was mandatory could use a bar code format or an electronic tag format to verify that the ingredients and the manufacturing of the medication were authentic in each phase, from the active ingredients’ manufacturing to the pharmacy where it is sold.

Today there are fake drugs so sophisticated that experts in the health field could not tell the difference in the packaging of the product that was approved by the FDA and its fake look-alike.

This type of tracking system has been pushed for by safety advocates for many years, but an attempt to include it in legislation for FDA drug safety failed last summer.