After the Bureau of Customs headed by Commissioner Rufino Biazon successfully seized P400 million worth of fake Tuseran Forte capsules and batteries for Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung mobile phones, he mentioned that these will be destroyed since they can never be auctioned.

 

With the sequestered fake drugs that sometimes can have no effect at all and at worst, could aggravate a patient’s health problems, not to mention the financial problems this would bring; one might ask what are the signs that a certain medicine is a fake.

 

First, check labels and packaging. Most counterfeit drugs have labels that are poor replicas of the original. Check the packaging for information about the manufacturer, date of manufacture and the lot number. Health Secretary Enrique Ona said many drugs were sold in packages containing only the name of the distributor.

 

The pills themselves could be irregularly colored or may have dark spots or they crumble easily. Sometimes they do not have a bisection or a line that divides the tablet in two.

 

Consumers should also buy from drugstores licensed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and ask for a receipt so they could go back if they were sold suspect drugs.

 

Also as they say, if it’s too good to be true then maybe it is. So if the price of a drug is too low, then don’t buy it. Better safe than sorry.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 at 4:55 pm and is filed under News and Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.