Counterfeit pharmaceutical products are a growing global problem and a serious threat to public health. Counterfeit medicines today make-up an estimated 1 percent of pharmaceutical product sales in developed countries to more than 30 percent in some parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America where regulatory and legal oversight is weakest, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).¹ The number of incidents trended up by 24 percent from 2007, over 100 countries are now impacted, and thousands of deaths per year (mostly in developing countries) have been traced to counterfeit products.

A counterfeit medicine is usually defined as a product that "is deliberately and fraudulently mislabeled with respect to identity and/or source" (WHO). Counterfeit products can include wrong doses of active ingredient, no active ingredient or, in some cases, poisonous ingredients. As counterfeiters have become more sophisticated, counterfeit products have become so similar in appearance to authentic products that without laboratory testing it is difficult to tell the authentic from the counterfeit medicines.

For Merck, maintaining patient safety and protecting our reputation are paramount, and are the principle goals underlying our corporate anti-counterfeiting strategy.

The content on this page was last modified on September 15, 2009.

Merck & Co., Inc., Whitehouse Station, NJ, USA, and Schering-Plough Corporation, Kenilworth, NJ, USA, are now one company. We have combined our global operations under the name Merck & Co., Inc. We are working to update our corporate responsibility Web site to reflect our new, combined, global organization.

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