No deal ‘will expose British patients to fake medicines’

A NO-DEAL Brexit could lead to a scheme to stop fake medicines entering Britain being scrapped just seven weeks after its launch, pharmaceutical leaders say.

The new Europe-wide system, which goes live this weekend, means that every person in the medicines’ supply chain is able to check a drug’s authenticity.

But pharmaceutical leaders said Britain would drop out of the system if it left the EU without a deal.

The Europe-wide Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD) will see newstyle packaging to prevent tampering, with the aim of securing the supply chain of medicines. Manufacturers and importers will also serialise the packaging of their prescription medicines with a unique identifier that is then uploaded to a European database.

However, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry the trade body for the UK’S branded pharmaceutical industry, said a no-deal Brexit would mean the UK drops out of the new system. As a result, patients in Britain would be left “more exposed to the dangers of fake medicines than other patients in the EU,” they warn.

A spokesman for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said that “packs containing the FMD safety features will be accepted in the UK, provided they are in line with other UK packaging requirements”.