Weak legislation and poor healthcare has increasingly encouraged the growth of a dangerous counterfeit market, one that distributes fake substandard medicines around the globe. Today, it’s estimated these fakes amount to 30% of all medicines in Latin America, while the figure in Africa may be even higher.

 

Safeguarding public health from these dangers needs to be a fundamental priority, yet it remains almost impossible for customs checks in their current mold to verify every single drug coming in, especially ones designed to deceive. The challenge becomes even harder when you consider only 1% of goods are properly inspected, the scale of imports, the irregularity of lab testing, and the difficulty of detecting identical ‘knockoffs.’

 

FAKE & SUBSTANDARD MEDICINES

 

To understand the threat better, it’s important to draw a distinction between fake medicines, which are criminal counterfeits that can contain dangerous lethal substances such as paint, chalk, or even rat poison, and substandard medicines, which are legally produced, but with insufficient quality and poor manufacturing.

 

Regulations against both of these issues exist, but enforcement is lacking. One of the reasons for this is that today’s biggest exporters are India and China, regions where reliable data is scarce and manufacturing involves thousands of small producers beyond the reach of most regulators. For us to curb fake & substandard medicines in global trade, we need to give authorities the ability to see the entirety of the production supply chain, particularly those complex areas and manufacturing blindspots where the risks can be traced back to.

 

Full visibility not only provides the capacity to uncover the potential risk of the drug being counterfeit or poor quality, it also provides scope to unearth any irregularity at any point before it threatens public safety.

 

PUBLICAN TRANSFORMS OUR ABILITY TO TACKLE FAKE & SUBSTANDARD DRUGS

 

Publican transforms the fight against fake medicines with a unique AI-driven Digital Vetting Technology that achieves full visibility into every part of the medical supply chain. Here’s how:

 

Maximizing the Data: Everyone today has a global digital footprint, even those in hard-to-reach places such India and China. So instead of relying on limited internal data, Publican’s system accesses thousands of unique external sources and can analyze every single entity connected to a medical shipment – marking a completely new level of visibility for customs checks, one that lets them flag 100% of the risks associated with counterfeit medicines.

 

Smart Technology: AI-driven digital vetting technology rapidly collates and analyzes billions of unique data points connected to a drug’s production journey in real time, including physical source labels, criminal pasts, and company registrations. Such automated intelligence allows for accurate and rapid detection of the finest irregularities in a medicine’s supply chain that have previously gone unnoticed in standard checks.

 

Behavioral Analytics: Since medical counterfeiters are so adept at evasion, Publican’s multidimensional analysis harnesses deep behavioral indicators associated with fake drugs, using smart tools that finely analyze legal histories, the value & weight of the medicine, cleansing mechanisms of the customs declaration, and common fraud analysis which can pinpoint suspicious trading routes.

 

With these transformative capabilities, Publican’s 100% inspection rate allows regions like Africa & Latin America to fight off the scourge of fake medicines once and for all. To learn more, visit https://publican.ultra.global/