3 December 2018
Mike Isles, Executive Director of ASOP EU and the EAASM, addressed doctors at the Global Health Horizons – “Learning from the past, looking into the future” symposium held at the Royal College of Physicians, in London.
Mike expressed his deep concern that the public and therefore patients were not being made aware of the rising tide of falsified medicines – the title of his talk.
He emphasised the need for all stakeholder engagement and stressed the role that doctors could play to help educate the public. Mike stated that most patients will have explored their health issues by searching the Internet. Doctors, community or hospital, have a clear duty of care to ascertain, as much as they can, if their patients have bought medicines from the Internet. With 35,000 illicit websites aimed at the European citizen and an estimated 130 million people in Europe buying medicines online, this underlines the importance of doctors taking a pro-active stance.
Mike also took the opportunity to reveal ground breaking evidence collected from the ASOP EU/EAASM educational website. With over 2300 survey responses from would-be buyers of medicines online, the respondents revealed an overwhelming desire to change their behaviour and find a safe, genuine place to buy their medicines, once they understood that 96% of websites visible from the Internet in Europe are illegal.