Counterfeiting is a problem that various industries have been struggling with for years. Counterfeiting certain products, such as clothing and luxury goods, is harmful primarily to manufacturers, but fake food and drugs are life-threatening.
How treatable diseases become incurable
Pharmaceuticals are the foundation of healthcare in any country. Counterfeit medicines are a global problem. When we talk about fake drugs, we mean drugs that are illegally manufactured or packaged in the wrong packaging. Such products seem genuine for customers but they may not contain the active substance, may contain the wrong substance, or contain the wrong amount of the right substance. Counterfeiting of medicines is a profitable, criminal industry, the statistics of which cause serious concern:
- According to Interpol, every year worldwide, more than 200,000 people die from counterfeit anti-allergic drugs;
- The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that approximately 10% of the world’s pharmaceutical products may be counterfeit. The figure is much higher in developing countries;
- The pharmaceutical market is valued at $1.04 trillion, and the counterfeit industry is valued at $100 billion.
Counterfeit medicines enter the pharmaceutical supply chain at any time. Large companies may unwittingly buy fake ingredients from suppliers. Before packages of pills reach the customer, they travel long distances and move from a middleman to a middleman several times. Quality checks performed at different stages of supply become useless.
EmerDPO – a solution for the pharmaceutical industry
Blockchain is an innovative technology that can solve many problems and the problem of counterfeiting is one of them. Emercoin has developed EmerDPO Antifake – a solution to combat counterfeiting in various industries. By transferring a trust factor to the Emercoin blockchain, physical and digital goods can be assigned unchanged unique IDs.
EmerDPO Antifake allows creating digital passports for manufactured products, store them on the Emercoin blockchain and link them to the manufacturer. Any interested person, including suppliers and customers, can verify the authenticity of each product.
To make the solution as effective as possible, it must be used in all operations prior to the delivery of drugs to pharmacies. Thus, the pharmaceutical company will be able to track the authenticity of ingredients purchased from suppliers, ensuring the high quality of manufactured products. It is not possible to create an ID without an encrypted private key that is owned by the manufacturer.
The blockchain-based solution also allows installing scanners in pharmacies or using smartphones to scan QR codes and receive information about medicines.
EmerDPO Antifake can be integrated into existing infrastructure. Its use is inexpensive. In just 1 EMC, one can get 2000 DPO certificates for five years. This is a low price for a solution that can save thousands of human lives around the world.