Are your medicines safe - hardly if you live in China, India or Turkey

The Stockholm Network have done an excellent comparison of the Drug Regulatory Authorities in five countries; China, Brazil, Turkey, Argentina and India. The aim is to see if the framework ensures that no fake or substandard drugs reaches the patients. The individual regulatory systems are compared in four key categories and capabilities are ranked as: High, Medium or Low. Their findings are rather scare and the report is well worth reading for everyone also since its a good effort in defining how a good regulatory system should be built.

In the summary they conclude: "Counterfeiting is the deliberate production of illegal, unsanctioned and mostly harmful medicines. Substandard drugs, by contrast, can be produced, sold and distributed by completely legitimate and authorised entities who are often unaware of their product being (or becoming) substandard."

I would be curious to see a follow up where they look at all the EU countries to see to what extent substandard drugs can reach patients also in the EU.

The full report can be found here.