Tackling the booming trade in counterfeit drugs.

Last month 45 countries took part in the internet-based campaign Operation Pangea III to tackle online counterfeit drug crime. As a result, regulators recovered thousands of illicit and counterfeit drugs valued at US$2·6 million, 76 people were arrested across the globe, 694 website investigations were opened, and 290 illegal websites have already been shut down. The operation involved several international organisations, including police, customs, national drug regulators, and internet service providers working together. Operation Pangea III is the third of its kind, and over the past 2 years has aimed to raise awareness about the international black market of counterfeit medication. The head of INTERPOL, who coordinated the operation, lauded the fact that 20 more countries took part in the operation than in 2009, signifying a step towards greater international cooperation against counterfeit drug crime. The problem of counterfeit drugs was fi rst addressed at a conference in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. However, since then the counterfeit market has rapidly expanded, largely as a result of the widespread use of the internet to market counterfeit products. Counterfeit drug rackets are most common in regions where regulatory and policing systems for drugs are at their weakest, thus one of the key battlegrounds in the fi ght against organised counterfeit crime is Africa, where drugs are counterfeited on a huge scale. In June, 2009, a member of the Pharmacy Board of Sierra Leone reported that more than $150 million worth of counterfeit drugs are brought into Sierra Leone alone every year. Ashley How, European Director of the Pharmaceutical Security Institute, believes that counterfeit drugs further endanger the health of already vulnerable populations across the continent. One of the biggest problems when tackling counterfeit drugs is understanding the true scale of the issue. Surveillance of the problem is diffi cult, particularly in rural areas. “There are many reports of counterfeit medicines in Africa, especially antimalarials”, says Paul Newton, who is part of the Wellcome Trust-Mahost Hospital-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Collaboration, “but there have always been very few studies that allow one to estimate what proportion of the pharmaceutical market is counterfeit, and certainly none that allow a reliable estimate for the whole of Africa.”