Building a consensus to address the health threat posed by fake medicines, by Eduardo, director general IFPMA

At the end of this month, the WHO Working Group of Member States on Substandards/Spurious/Falsely-Labelled/Falsified/Counterfeit Medical Products will meet, points our International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations director general Eduardo Pisani.

The name indicates that terminology is an issue and this article will advocate flexibility to resolve this. On the agenda is the World Health Organization’s role in ensuring the availability of good-quality, safe, efficacious and affordable medical products, including the prevention and control of medical products of compromised quality, safety and efficacy. More specifically, the working group will also review the WHO’s relationship with the International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT).

These are all important questions, affecting both global health and the WHO’s role in achieving it. For the IFPMA, the most important outcome of this discussion must be that the WHO continues to play an active and visible leadership role in helping to ensure that medicines everywhere are of high quality, safe and efficacious, and that they are also what they purport to be. Furthermore, the global effort to secure quality medicines risks being undermined if Member States are unable to agree a course of action which clearly signals that the production and distribution of deliberately falsified medicines are an important threat to patients’ health and a serious crime.