CAIRO - Local trade in counterfeit medical drugs, including liver and heart medicines, has peaked this year as the economy continues to slump after the January 25 revolution, a report showed. The report, according to Al-Gomhuriya newspaper, said that an estimated LE1 billion in fake medicines flowed across the local market. That figure is expected to rise 10 per cent this year, the paper said. "The sale of counterfeit medical drugs has risen," pharmacist Mohamed Magdi of Cairo has told the paper. Magdi said that the Ministry of Health should enforce effective measures to stop counterfeit trade in medicines, which kill thousands of patients each year. "The local drug companies are increasingly concerned about bogus drugs getting into the legitimate distribution system, potentially posing a serious health hazard as well as undermining the reputation of their products, Abdul Aziz Hanafi, another Cairo pharmacist, said, warning that the problem was spreading. Hanafi blamed so-called "back street factories that are owned by criminals" for fuelling the sale of counterfeit medical drugs in the governorates and rural areas. "The profits are so high, and the penalties are so low," he said, urging the Minister of Health, Dr. Ashraf Hatem, to take action now. He recommended that the Minister should introduce a unique coding for each pack of medicine together with authentication, track and trace systems and physical security in the form of tamper-resistant packaging to solve the problem. He also called on the police to crackdown on underground dens selling fakes. "The police must keep on taking proactive measures, striking hard against the illegal behaviour of the production and sale of fake and shoddy drugs," Hanafi said. Fake drugs have become an ever-increasing problem in Egypt, Pharmacist Magdi said. "The fake drug has a low effectiveness or the concentration may be wrong. Other times, the product may have none of the ingredients that it claims to contain," he explained. Magdi said that the problem was most serious, however, in the rural areas ��" where many fake drugs are manufactured ��" and in the villages, where poverty and slack oversight had created a breeding ground for bogus pharmaceuticals. He said that he believed counterfeits make up 20 per cent of the medicines sold in Egypt each year. "Counterfeiting is a very lucrative business, production of bogus medicine is growing and the lack of security only expands it," he added.
