Product verification and Anti-counterfeiting

Criminal statistics shows that of any given country, you would soon gather that counterfeits, forgery and replica products are increasing among international criminal offenses. Virtually all sectors have been affected, especially the medicine industry. It is an alarming development that has led governments and international organizations to draw up laws and anti-counterfeit mechanism against this growing felony. Presently pharmaceutical industry is one of the most affected sectors. It is estimated that around 50% of medicines ordered online are fake. It must not be ignored that the risk duplicate products pose to users can be very high.

The risk impact of duplicate medicines is very high. It ranges from ineffectiveness and incorrect dosage to ingredients that pose a risk to health – lives of People and well-being are in danger . As for producers, they suffer financial damage and loss of image and consumer confidence due to imitated pharmaceutical products. Over time the fight against pharmaceutical counterfeiters has seen the creation of a number of organizations which seek and develop solutions to the anti-counterfeit situation.

One of the most effective is the International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT), which was founded by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2006. A wide range of groups and administrative bodies work together in this organization, such as NGOs (non-governmental organizations), law enforcement agencies, manufacturer associations in the pharmaceutical industry and a whole range of international organizations. Its aim is to draw up legal framework conditions, initiate technologies for the traceability of products and their protection against counterfeits, while supporting international standards for product marking.

From the individual packaging to the shipping pallets and shipping containers used to transport the goods. From the manufacturer via national and international trade chains to pharmacists. Counterfeiting and fraud can only be eliminated if a product can be seamlessly traced right back to its manufacture from every point in the logistics chain. Against this background, pharmaceutical companies find themselves in an extremely difficult situation. On the one hand, they must comply with the relevant legal framework conditions and their own compliance standards.

Safety first

Safety requires rules and expertise,

All leading bodies and organizations agree that the alarming increase in counterfeit products means that the entire supply chain must be as seamlessly secure as possible. Serialization in the form of the clear inspection and tracing of medicines across all stages of manufacturing and packaging is therefore a decisive step in ensuring quality, safety and trust. Transparent data and documentation management is a fundamental requirement here. Due to the international value-added chains within the pharmaceutical industry, an internationally uniform procedure would be desirable. However in reality the situation is quite different. There are many ways of implementing traceability.The most common encoding methods are:

• Barcodes
• 2D-codes
• RFID-tags