Battling the rising tide of fake medicine

Sales of counterfeit drugs are booming around the world, putting thousands of lives at risk. Why is it so hard to stem the tide of fake medicine? To the naked eye, the two pills of the anti-diabetic medicine Janumet look identical. They are both embossed with the number “577” in the same font and size. Only when Stéphanie Beer, a forensic scientist at the pharmaceutical group MSD, puts them under a 3D macroscope do the miniscule differences appear. On one pill, the number “577” is etched at a marginally shallower depth than on a genuine tablet produced at an MSD factory. “To laypeople, counterfeit medicines are often indistinguishable from the originals,” Beer said during a media tour of MSD’s forensics lab in Schachen, southwest of Zurich. “Without putting the original next to it, it’s hard to see that it is a fake.” Forensics experts in the product integrity team at MSD, known as Merck & Co. in the United States, are trained to look for such details. They have backgrounds in ...