 |
| December 2007 |
EditorialWe are pleased to mail you the first edition of our GPHF Newsletter. GPHF News regularly informs you about the GPHF-Minilab® and current developments in the area of counterfeit drugs. We hope that GPHF News will be of interest to you and naturally welcome not only your suggestions but also constructive criticism. Dr. Jürgen Knackmuss More than 40 additional GPHF-Minilabs® deliveredThe worldwide demand for the GPHF-Minilab® is undiminished. This year alone, GPHF despatched another 44 mobile laboratory units for the identification of counterfeit drugs. A total of 270 laboratory units for protection from counterfeit drugs are already in operation in 65 countries worldwide, mainly in Africa and Southeast Asia. A current overview of the countries using the GPHF-Minilab® is given here. A GPHF-Minilab® instead of Christmas presentsCONCEPT HEIDELBERG, Europe’s leading service provider for advanced training and information in the area of pharmaceutical quality assurance and drug safety sets a good example: instead of Christmas presents, the company is donating a GPHF-Minilab® this year. Dr. Jürgen Knackmuss, Chairman of GPHF, personally accepted the donation on a visit to the company. In the meantime, the compact laboratory is already en route to its destination in Ghana where it will monitor the drug quality at one of the many diocesan pharmacies of the Roman Catholic Church.
The recent press release about the CONCEPT HEIDELBERG donation is found here. Special Minilab programme for the PhilippinesTogether with the World Health Organisation (WHO) West Pacific Regional Office, the Philippine health authorities are currently implementing numerous measures to identify counterfeit drugs better and faster in the future. These measures also include the nationwide use of Field Food And Drug Regulation Officers who are initially to test ten selected active ingredients of drugs throughout the country with simple laboratory equipment and a short version of the GPHF-Minilab® Manual. Suspected cases are to be passed on to the National Drug Quality Control Laboratory for further investigation. Revision of GPHF-Minilab® ManualsGPHF is currently revising all manuals for the GPHF-Minilab® published up to now. The manuals on both Thin Layer Chromatographic and Colour Reaction Tests will be available next year as new editions, uniting all the previous supplements into two comprehensive books. With the GPHF-Minilab®, 43 active ingredients used mainly in Developing Countries can currently be analysed quickly and reliably by simple test methods. An overview of the active agents that can be analysed with the GPHF-Minilab® is given here. More training and presentations by GPHFOver the last few months, GPHF has carried out numerous additional GPHF-Minilab® training courses and presentations. Project leader Dr. Richard Jähnke also introduced the mobile mini-laboratory to the United Nations Office for “Drugs & Crime” in Vienna which is currently planning a laboratory programme for the improvement of drug control and narcotics in Africa. Demonstrations and trainings on GPHF-Minilab® test methods have already been carried out, for instance, at Pamplona in Spain during a Primary Health Care course for staff of African health care providers and for Irish and British staff of the Lloyds retail pharmacy chain for missions in Kenya and India. IMPACT! presents brochure
You can download the brochure here. Initiatives against counterfeit drugs: The Declaration of RomeIn February 2006, the World Health Organisation (WHO) invited international experts and stakeholders from governmental agencies and industry to a meeting in Rome to indicate new ways of combating counterfeit drugs internationally. The recently published Declaration of Rome was one of the results of the meeting. It begins by noting that the “Counterfeiting medicines, including the entire range of activities from manufacturing to providing them to patients, is a vile and serious criminal offence that puts human lives at risk and undermines the credibility of health systems.” This says it all. The exact wording of the Declaration of Rome is found here. (Link to IMPACT brochure on GPHF page) The German Federal Bureau of Investigation (BKA) and the OECD also warn about counterfeit drugsThe fact that counterfeit drugs are not exclusively a problem of the Developing Countries has now also been made clear by the German Federal Bureau of Investigation (BKA). In October, the bureau published a new study under the title “Drug crime – a growing market?” warning among other things against the dangers of pharmaceutical Internet commerce. The 28-page study can be obtained under www.bka.de in the Internet. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has now also published a report documenting the worldwide increase in counterfeit drugs. In this connection, there are reports on a counterfeit drug from China that was subsequently distributed in no less than 42 countries. More information on the OECD report can be found here. Drug counterfeits: recent casesIn the past few months, numerous cases around the world have again highlighted the actual dimensions of the counterfeiting problem. A selection:
Impressum: The Global Pharma Health Fund e.V. (GPHF) is a charitable organization initiated and funded exclusively by donations from Merck Darmstadt. If you would like to unsubscribe from this newsletter, please use the following URL: |
“Counterfeit Drugs Kill!” Under this heading, the
International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce – abbreviated to
IMPACT! – has published an informative and easily understood brochure on the
subject of counterfeit drugs. The brochure not only examines the varied
background to the phenomenon of counterfeit drugs but gives a detailed
presentation of the focal points in the future work of the Taskforce.