Pharmaceutical Packaging Protection Solutions from TracePack

According to WHO, up to two billion people around the world lack access to necessary medicines, vaccines, medical devices including in vitro diagnostics, and other health products, which creates a vacuum that is too often filled by substandard and falsified products. This problem is growing as global supply chains become more complex, meaning products manufactured in one country may be packaged in a second country and distributed across borders to be marketed or sold to consumers in a third. The growth of e-commerce also contributes to this trend by making it easier to purchase medicines online, often from unauthorized sources.

Counterfeit medicines affect economies in several areas:

• Individuals who fall victim to low quality counterfeit products that may not adequately treat their medical needs.
• Legitimate producers, who can lose sales to counterfeiters, and need to take steps to ensure that counterfeiters do not infiltrate their supply chains, and to mount efforts to combat counterfeiters.
• Governments, which are actively involved in managing health care in countries.
• Entire economies, in the form of the impact on crime levels, the environment and the possible effects on jobs and foreign investment.

It is often assumed that high-income countries with strong regulatory systems can effectively exclude substandard and falsified medical products from their markets, but WHO analysis shows that this is not necessarily the case, as reports on these products have been submitted by countries in Western Europe and North America as well as other high-income settings. In an analysis of cases of counterfeit incidents involving penetration of legitimate supply chains and reported to PSI CIS database between 2009 and 2011, Mackey et al. (2015) revealed that upper and lower-middle income countries comprised 93% of all the cases. Analysis of the health consequences of falsified medicines performed by Rahman et al. (2018) showed that the 48 reported incidents involving health damage due to falsified medicines were almost equally distributed among developing (27 cases, 56.3%) and developed countries (21 cases, 43.7%).

TracePack is the licensed African distributor of Arca and specialises in the sale of equipment to mark, code or label any products. The latest labelling system within the Arca Pharma labelling machine line is the Pharma Seal 4.0, which offers high speed tamper evident label application on pharmaceutical packaging, with a compact stainless steel main base of just 1320mm this automatic industrial pharmaceutical labelling machine is designed to meet the requirements of tamper-evident labelling within operation pharmaceutical packaging lines by applying one or two tamper evident seal labels on pharmaceutical formed cardboard boxes at speeds of up to 300 products per minute, with advanced 4.0 functions.

The Customs departments of European countries seize up to 2.4 million counterfeit pharmaceutical packages each year. According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, it is assumed that around 10 per cent of all medicines worldwide are counterfeits. In developing countries, that proportion even rises to 30 per cent. It is not only luxury pharmaceuticals but antibiotics, cholesterol and cancer drugs as well and the damage is not merely financial. It is therefore more important than ever in the fight against drug counterfeiters to have clear identification and traceability of the original products, with the use of our range of In-Sight vision systems we can verify labels safely, identify codes and OCR (optical character recognition data, ensuring the track and trace of pharmaceutical folding boxes.As you prepare for compliance with global traceability requirements and transition from batch to item level serialization, it’s important to keep in mind that compliance requires much more than simply reading a code on a label or part. For mass serialization to support traceability, it is first essential to verify code quality and validate that all of the encoded data is accurate and correctly formatted. The In-Sight Track & Trace^TM works with network In-Sight vision systems to create a complete identification and data verification solution for serialized labels on pharmaceutical packaging making sure that you can easily and cost-effectively comply with patient safety and traceability requirements.