How to identify counterfeit medications by series online. How to check the authenticity of a medicine: methods and tips
Currently, not a single person can do without medicine: be it a child or adult population, everyone at some time has to, due to circumstances, take medication.
IN lately The opinion about the counterfeiting of pharmaceutical products has spread massively, and therefore the population increasingly begins to have doubts about their authenticity.
The functioning of any pharmacy is a business and the only goal is to make large profits. Competition in this business has increased significantly, but income, on the contrary, has fallen.
Most pharmacies became uncompetitive and ceased operations.
This picture has given unscrupulous pharmacists a reason to resort to deception and sell counterfeit medicine. Those who suffer the most here are those who chronic diseases and it is necessary to take the medicine daily, and it is expensive, which is counterfeited and passed off as natural. I would like to emphasize that cheap medicines cannot be counterfeited, as they produce little profit.
Accurate test result
If you have doubts about the quality of the purchased medicine, you must use the services of a supervisory authority.
Specialists will make an assessment and, after the examination, provide a document confirming the conformity of the product. If you receive a negative result, contact the Consumer Rights Protection Committee. Moreover, you have every right to make claims for damages and payment for moral damages.
In order to protect yourself, you need to buy medicine only in municipal pharmacies, bypassing various dubious pharmacy points. If you buy medications through online pharmacies, it is better to turn to good and time-tested ones, for example, paniapteka.ua.
Before paying for the goods, you need to pay attention to the following points:
If there are grammatical errors in the annotation text;
It doesn’t say “best before...” on the packaging;
Not glossy packaging;
The manufacturer, his address and telephone number are not marked on the packaging;
There is no certificate or quality certificate.
A home way to check whether a medicine is fake or not
In fact, there is a very simple and accessible way for everyone to check pills. The annotation states the absorption time of the medicine. To do this, place the tablet in water and record the time. The tablet should melt without a trace within the time specified in the instructions. If the tablet does not completely dissolve and a sediment remains, then it is obvious that it is a fake.
Before purchasing a medicine, be sure to compare the information on the certificate with the information on the packaging and it will become clear to you what you are buying.
Instructions
Buy medications only from trusted pharmacies that have worked well for you and your friends. Do not take it under any circumstances medical supplies from hand, in the market. Nowadays it has become popular to buy medicines -. On the one hand, it’s very convenient when you don’t have to rush around the city looking for the right product, but on the other hand, the risk of running into a fake is very high. Therefore, you should use such services very carefully.
When purchasing a medicine, carefully consider and study its packaging. It must be intact, undamaged, and made of high-quality material. All inscriptions and colors on it must be clear, crisp and bright. Name of medicine and active substance must exactly match what the doctor prescribed for you. If it is in at least one letter, then refuse to purchase this drug.
Look at the leaflet for the medicine. It should be printed, not photocopied. The text must be clear and easily readable. Again, the drug and active ingredient must match what the doctor prescribed. IN modern medicines folded in such a way that the blister or bottle is divided in half. In counterfeit drugs, both the annotation and the medicine itself are kept separately.
Check the batch, production date and expiration date indicated on the box and on the blister (or bottle). If the data does not match, then this is a fake.
Ask the seller for a certificate of conformity if you doubt the authenticity of the medicine. It must indicate the trade name and product, and where the medicine was produced, information that this batch has passed quality control and has a quality control certificate and a manufacturer’s quality certificate.
Ask your doctor who prescribed the drug to show you what it should look like. Manufacturers usually put various distinctive features in the form of a hologram, inscriptions on, etc.
If the medicine is unknown to you, then study the information about it in the reference book of medicines (RLS). This reference book has a section “Drug Identifier”, where there is not only information about all drugs, but also photographs of all dosage forms and packaging of those products that are most often at risk.
Sources:
- How to distinguish a counterfeit drug
- How to distinguish real medicines from fake ones?
When you buy an expensive perfume, and when you come home, you discover that it is fake, you will agree that it becomes very disappointing. To prevent this from happening next time, you need to remember a few simple rules, allowing you to distinguish a fake from the original.
Instructions
The packaging of perfume is the first thing you need to pay attention to. The polyethylene that tightly fits a box of expensive perfumes must be thin. The fit should be tight and there should be no folds anywhere. A fake, as a rule, is distinguished by poorly glued polyethylene. The original wrapper should have a seal in the form of a rectangle or circle.
The bottle is not very similar to the original bottle. The fake perfume bottle has sloppy curves, unclear inscriptions and glass defects. The glass of the bottle of original products is usually transparent and clean; there cannot be air balls or cloudiness inside. This perfume does not have a metal lid; if the perfume comes into contact with metal, it may deteriorate. The liquid itself cannot be cloudy either; if there is sediment, it is a fake.
The inscriptions on the bottle can tell a lot. Sometimes one extra letter signals a fake. Most common mistake is the letter “e” at the end of perfume. To this
An experiment on drug labeling began in six regions of the country on February 1. Following fur coats and alcohol, medicines will also have their own “black mark”. However, the mark is not completely black: the DataMatrix marking looks like a drawn labyrinth (see photo on the first page), it will be applied using a special printer to each package, complementing the existing barcode. The “pilot” will start with several types of medicines, and over time they will “tag” all the medicines produced in a row. Why is this necessary? What will it give to buyers? And, in the end, how much will it cost and will they more expensive than medicine?
In the Kaluga region, in the Vorsino industrial park, there is a modern pharmaceutical plant: several dozen types of tablets are produced and packaged here. Packs of tablets packaged in blisters run along the conveyor belt. Here is a printer that can “draw” a labyrinth of the required configuration in a split second.
“We support the idea of introducing labeling, so we decided to enter into the experiment without delay,” said production director Gennady Pyatsky. “Although the government decree has already entered into force, it has not yet precise instructions about the marking technology, it is also not clear what data will be encoded in it. Product ID, serial number and batch number, expiration date - this is a minimum. The system is flexible; it can accommodate a lot of information. Time is allotted until the summer to resolve all these details. Our equipment allows us to apply DataMatrix, because all our factories - both in Europe and in Russia - are built according to the same standards and equipped in the same way. And in Europe, they have been introducing such labeling since 2010." According to Pyatsky, if labeling rules similar to European ones are introduced on the Russian pharmaceutical market, the process here can go quite quickly and painlessly.
Why was it decided to choose a special two-dimensional DataMatrix code for marking? Firstly, this is not an expensive technology (according to calculations, the cost of one package of medicine will increase by 1-1.5 rubles, or, if we talk about drugs in the middle price segment, by only 1%). On the other hand, such identification will allow automatic mode identify substandard and counterfeit medicines. Finally, thirdly, such labeling has already been introduced in European countries, Turkey, the USA, India, and Brazil. It is also being implemented in Ukraine - so a unified type of drug identification will help different countries unite and better fight counterfeiting together. “In EU countries such marking is already mandatory; in any case, we print a two-dimensional code on all our products,” says Pyatsky.
“Labelling contains undoubted advantages for business,” says Dmitry Bagley, a specialist in marking technologies. “It will not only reduce the losses of bona fide manufacturers and sellers from counterfeit goods, but will also improve logistics, since it will be possible to quickly track the movement of goods.”
It is clear that special equipment will be needed to apply the markings. Equipping one production line, according to Dmitry Bagley, will cost pharmaceutical companies from 30 to 150 thousand euros. But the investments are long-term, and besides, thanks to labeling, manufacturers will reduce image losses from “fraudulent” drugs going on sale.
“Imagine: a person buys a medicine from a specific manufacturer, and inside there is a “dummy” that does not cure. But the patient does not know that he bought a counterfeit and transfers all the negativity to the pharmaceutical company indicated on the label,” explained Gennady Pyatsky. “That’s why all companies are interested that if a fake or counterfeit is discovered, this batch will be withdrawn from sale immediately. The barcode does not provide such efficiency, but DataMatrix - please put the scanner against the brand - and in a second you will receive an answer: is a particular pack of medicine legal or not.”
It is interesting that not only specialists - distributors, pharmacists - will be able to arrange such a “falsity” check. In the pharmacy there will be special scanners for each seller, and also publicly available, in trading floor- for buyers. So anyone can verify the legality of the purchased medicine using such a scanner. Moreover, it will be possible to “read” the markings using a regular smartphone if you install a special application on it.
How much will DataMatrix cost the buyer?
The biggest concern is how the introduction of labeling will affect the price of the medicine. It’s one thing to mark a fur coat worth several tens or even hundreds of thousands of rubles, and quite another thing when we're talking about about a socially significant product.
However, the experts interviewed by RG do not see a serious price threat in the innovation. "It is difficult to talk about the rise in price of drugs due to labeling, since this percentage will vary for different drugs. We can only talk about the costs of applying labeling to packaging, this is about 1.5 rubles without taking into account the costs of informatization and equipment necessary for the operation of the system at distributors and pharmacies," he believes general manager DSM Group Sergey Shulyak.
The head of the Pharmacy Guild, Elena Nevolina, agrees with the expert. The cost of a scanner for a pharmacy is approximately 20 thousand rubles, the investment is feasible, and will not seriously affect the cost of medicines. “Of course, several scanners will be needed, but I think, since the program is state-owned, pharmacies will be helped with re-equipment,” Nevolina suggested. She recalled that from July 1, all pharmacies, like other enterprises retail, switch to using new cash registers equipped with scanners to record trade turnover in the Federal Tax Service. “It is important that the equipment is compatible. If you have to work with two different scanners, there is a risk of errors,” the expert believes.
Help "RG"
Participation in the experiment was announced by: Moscow and the Moscow region, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novgorod, Belgorod regions. The “pilot” included 23 pharmaceutical manufacturers, large distribution companies, over 30 hospitals and clinics and more than 250 pharmacies, including large chains.
The entire technological chain will have to be launched by June: install equipment and software, train specialists. And as we are ready to cover more and more names of drugs with labeling.
If the experiment justifies itself and the labeling covers all manufactured medicines, in a year the monitoring system will track about 6 billion packages of medicines and cover more than 350 thousand participants in circulation, including about 1000 domestic and foreign manufacturers medicines, over 100 thousand hospitals and 250 thousand pharmacies.