The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate that up to 1% of pharmaceutical products in industrialised countries are counterfeit/falsified medicines. The Falsified Medicines Directive is a collaboration of Government, pharmaceutical manufacturers, GPs and other health professionals to help eliminate counterfeit medicines in the UK.
Global Health Travel Clinics are now members of SecurMed UK which is the UK Medicines Verification Organisation, a non-profit organisation, which manages the FMD in the UK.
From 9th February 2019 manufacturers will update packaging on medicines to include the 2D barcodes and a tamper-proof seal.
Over time, ‘product’ barcodes will change to the unique 2D data-matrix code on each individual pack. This allows the identification of at least the name of the medicine, the common name, the pharmaceutical form, the strength, the pack size, and the pack type a serial number which is a numeric or alphanumeric sequence of a maximum of 20 characters randomly generated a batch number an expiry date.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers generate the codes and upload them onto the central database. We will scan the code on vaccination/supply, and this decommissions the product. If the products are falsified with fake codes or codes are copied or a product already decommissioned an alarm will be issued before supply/vaccination takes place.