China crack down on fake drug web sites

China's State Food and Drug Administration has black-listed 23 web sites for selling counterfeit medicines or for using exaggerated claims to promote certain products. According to the Xinhua news agency, some of the identified sites claimed to be sponsored by legitimate research centers from leading universities.

One example given by the SFDA was for an organization claiming to be the China Medical University's bone diseases rehabilitation center. The genuine institution was rebranded as the Peking University Health Science Center after being incorporated into the Beijing university eight years ago. It does not have a unit dedicated to bone disease rehabilitation, Xinhua reported. This was surpassed late last year when an imitation of the SFDA's own web site was created, complete with bogus lists of approved drugs (Marketletter November 17, 2007).

Yan Jiangying, a spokeswoman for the SFDA, admitted that forcing illegal web sites to close down was not a permanent solution, as the operators often set up new ones within hours. However, she noted that, under the country's Criminal Law, producers or distributors of fake drugs face the death penalty if patients die or suffer serious harm.