This month, we celebrate Thanksgiving, making it an ideal time to give thanks and reflect on the positive things that have happened over the past year. In our efforts to combat rogue online pharmacies and educate consumers, these are some of the things that we at CSIP are most thankful for this year:

• Search Engines Tighten Efforts to Thwart Rogue Sites: Search engines who are members of CSIP, such as Yahoo, Google, and Bing (Microsoft), have tightened their policies to prevent these rogue sites from participating in their advertising programs. Recently, Bing made additional policy changes that make it more difficult for rogue Internet drug outlets to advertise, demonstrating the search engine’s commitment to patient safety.
• Minilabs: To help protect consumers from the threat of dangerous counterfeits, the Global Pharma Health Fund (GPHF) developed Minilabs, as a portable and low-cost means of identifying counterfeit drugs. Minilabs were designed to improve access to good quality, safe, and beneficial medicines, and can detect 75 active ingredients. Currently, more than 700 Minilabs have been supplied across 90 countries.
• Tag Technology: The company, TruTag, rose to the task of developing on-dose authentication in the form of microtags that can be coated onto medicine and serve as edible bar codes. The edible tags are incorporated into the drugs themselves and reveal if a pill is authentic, as well as other product intelligence. RFID tags, NanoCodes, and serialization using unique numbers or barcodes with specialty inks are also being used to track counterfeit drugs.
• Medicrime Convention: The Council of Europe established this Convention, the first international treaty against counterfeit medical products and similar crimes involving threats to public health. Stakeholders, including the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and Healthcare (EDQM), the Council of Europe, and pharmaceutical industry leaders are working together to get even more countries to participate in what IFPMA is calling “the biggest milestone to combat counterfeit drugs.” The Convention will enter into force on January 1, 2016.

CSIP and its member companies are grateful for the collaboration and hard work of our members, partners and law enforcement, and are excited about the positive developments in the fight against illicit online pharmacies this year. In the coming weeks, we will spotlight additional efforts we are thankful for this year.

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The Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies (CSIP) and our 12 member companies have the shared goal of helping address the growing problem of consumer access to illegitimate pharmaceutical products on the Internet. Continue to read this blog for updates on CSIP’s education, enforcement and information-sharing efforts.