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Ever wondered what to look out for when buying a medicine online? Our partner the International Institute of Research Against Counterfeit Medicines (IRACM) is relaunching its 12 Golden Rules campaign. The campaign aims to protect the health of patients and the wider public by providing practical advice on how to buy medicines safely online. In this video Tony and Max discuss buying slimming pills from a website. Watch to find out what happens!

Fake medicines pose a threat to patient safety, as they are often manufactured in unlicensed, unregulated and often unsanitary sites, and it can be impossible to know what’s inside them without chemical analysis. They can contain the wrong dose of active pharmaceutical ingredient, the wrong ingredients or even harmful substances. See the feature on fake medicines in Pharmaceuticals Policy and Law edition: “The Globalisation of the Pharmaceutical Industry” to learn why fake medicines present a risk to public Read more…

The Medicrime Convention is the only international legal instrument that has made it a criminal offence to produce and distribute fake medical products or commit similar crimes. Developed by the Council of Europe to protect public health, the Convention was adopted on 8 December 2010. It provides for the enforcement of effective, fitting and dissuasive sanctions to punish the production and trafficking of fake medical products, at both the national and international level.

La Convention Médicrime est l’unique instrument juridique pénal international criminalisant la fabrication et la distribution de faux produits médicaux ainsi que des infractions similaires. Développée par le Conseil de l’Europe pour protéger la santé publique, la convention Médicrime a été adoptée le 8 décembre 2010. Elle prévoit l’application de sanctions efficaces, proportionnées et dissuasives pour punir la production et le trafic de faux produits médicaux, sur un plan national et international.

Would you be able to tell a real medicine from a fake one? This important question is being posed to the public, health care professionals and policymakers by the World Health Professions Alliance (WHPA) in a new video. This uses the interactive function of YouTube. Viewers are asked to choose between two products and then shown the consequence of their decision: the person either recovers or ends up in hospital. Click on the screen or, Read more…