Pacific Northwest Dealing with Counterfeit Drugs

July 26, 2010

Counterfeit drugs may be on the rise in the Pacific Northwest, posing a serious health risk to those who depend on prescription medications. Some pharmaceutical industry experts say that the production of counterfeit drugs is a growing rapidly and America’s northwest region is one of the main places where this is occurring, reports KIRO radio.…

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Anti-counterfeiting Technology Could Help Governments Track Fake Drugs

July 23, 2010

Developing nations have struggled mightily with counterfeit drugs, like when 400 people in Nigeria, Haiti and Bangladesh died from taking a medication treated with wallpaper remover, and that is why anti-counterfeiting technologies can be important in preventing counterfeit drugs from entering the secure pharmaceutical supply chain. One such technology has been in use for diabetes…

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Edible Microtags: A New Anti-Counterfeiting Technology

July 20, 2010

While many anti-counterfeiting technologies focus on protecting consumers from counterfeit drugs through unique and hard-to-duplicate packaging, there is another way to ensure the authenticity of a medication: edible microtags. A number of companies have been working to develop this anti-counterfeiting technology after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released guidance on the matter last…

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Tiny Technology Could Stop Counterfeit Drugs

July 20, 2010

Ensuring that medications are authentic and not counterfeit drugs is essential for pharmaceutical companies to maintain patient safety. Now there is a new technology that appears to be able to do just that. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, tiny chips that can be tracked, have been used to track animals in the agriculture industry to…

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Can you spot a counterfeit version of a drug you take?

July 14, 2010

NBC’s Today show aired a piece this morning about counterfeits. Host Matt Lauer, who takes Lipitor, is shown two packages of pills. One bag has counterfeit Lipitor pills and the other one has the real drug. He looks at it and cannot figure out which is which. Check out the clip: Watch the full clip…

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Pfizer Shifts Approach on Fighting Counterfeit Drugs

July 12, 2010

In the past five years many unscrupulous individuals have tried to cash in on the market by producing counterfeit drugs. One convicted counterfeiter is Martin Hickman, who made millions of dollars by sellingknockoffs of Pfizer’s popular impotence drug, Viagra, on more than 150 websites, according to Business Week. The drug maker eventually caught Hickman and…

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THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Vice President, June 22, 2010

June 22, 2010

REMARKS BY THE VICE PRESIDENT AND VICTORIA ESPINEL, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ENFORCEMENT COORDINATOR, ON THE U.S. GOVERNMENT’S INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ENFORCEMENT STRATEGY Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C. 11:17 A.M. EDT THE VICE PRESIDENT: Welcome, everybody. We’re going to be relatively brief here. Thank you for being here. I’m going to ask Victoria, who was responsible for…

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Video Excerpts from Briefing of Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property

June 22, 2010

The following excerpts of today’s White House briefing on the Joint Strategic Plan for Intellectual Property Enforcement are relevant to the problem of counterfeit drugs.   Vice President Biden clearly identifies the problem facing consumers and patients today. To learn more about our take on this announcement, see our press release. Vice President: “We need…

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PSM Profiles the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies

June 21, 2010

In mid-May 2010, a collection of leaders in the pharmaceutical space joined to launch the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP), of which the Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM) is an educating party. We caught up with Libby Baney, an advisor at B&D Consulting who counsels the Alliance, to learn more about its mission. PSM:…

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Microsoft and Yahoo Announce Changes to Online Advertising of Pharmaceuticals

June 10, 2010

The Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM) commends mainstream search engines Microsoft and Yahoo for their recent decision requiring U.S. pharmaceutical advertisers to be accredited by the Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites (VIPPS) program in order to advertise online. Google was the first engine to require pharmaceutical advertisers to be VIPPS-accredited, a move the PSM commended…

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