The United States Pharmacopoeial Convention (USP) has called upon all the health organisations across the globe to join hands to fight against the counterfeit and substandard medicines spread across the global markets causing grave health hazards for the people in the world.

As part of this, USP is joining hands with every one interested in ‘Fight the Fake’ campaign which is aimed at raising awareness of counterfeit and substandard medicines across the world.

Especially the under privileged population in most of the third world countries have no proper access to sufficient quality drugs. This has lead to rise of counterfeit and substandard medicines that have become the cause of global health crisis.

According to World Health Organisation (WHO) the counterfeit and substandard medicines market constitute $431 billion market across the globe and has witnessed a 300 per cent growth since 2000. Fake medicines put patients at risk, offering potentially dangerous products that can increase resistance to real treatments or cause further illness, disability or even death. An estimated 25-60 per cent of the medicine supply in developing countries is either substandard or counterfeit.

Under the US Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, quality standards established by USP are enforceable by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for medicines and their ingredients manufactured, imported into, or marketed in the US.

As a leader in the fight against counterfeit and substandard medicines, USP is actively involved in a series of ongoing initiatives to help ensure the quality of medicines. The Promoting Quality of Medicines (PQM) programme implemented by USP and funded by US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been instrumental in addressing this significant public health challenge.

Since 2009, USP has been working to implement PQM program in more than 35 countries. It has given successful results with stark reduction in illegal pharmacies in Cambodia and the development of a quality control laboratory in Liberia that is leading the fight to prevent fake medicines from reaching their population. USP’s work with USAID and other partners has also helped to shed light on the pervasiveness of the problem of quality medicines. According to the PQM and Ghana FDA 2013 Post-Market Surveillance on Uteronics, 90 per cent of key medicines used to treat postpartum haemorrhage in Ghana failed tests for quality.

In May 2013, USP launched the Centre for Pharmaceutical Advancement and Training (CePAT) in Accra, Ghana in an effort to increase the number of experts and available tools to combat falsified, substandard and counterfeit medicines in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

To weed out the further spread of such medicines in the international marketplace for pharmaceuticals and their ingredients, it demands a cooperative solution. In view of this USP in a concerted effort to help protect people from fake medicines, is joining other global health organisations in ‘Fight to Fake’ campaign to raise awareness and mobilize strategic partners to address this growing problem, informed sources at USP.