Three times in the past year, fake versions of Pfizer’s heart drug Lipitor have found their way into the NHS supply chain, putting patients at risk.

Now the company has decided to cut out 18 wholesalers and will announce today that it will itself distribute drugs to pharmacies and dispensing doctors, with the aid of a single delivery company, UniChem.

Dr Olivier Brandicourt, Pfizer’s managing director, said: “We are deeply concerned with the current distribution system and the increased incidence of counterfeit medicines in the UK supply chain.”

Faking medicines is big business, and growing. The World Health Organisation has estimated that, worldwide, as many as one in ten medicines is a counterfeit. Last year incidents reported by the Pharmaceutical Security Institute increased by 27 per cent.

But Pfizer’s power to control its own medicines is limited. Under European law, it is legal to import medicines from the EU, repackage them and distribute them. This parallel trade, as it is called, will continue.

What the Pfizer move will do is to ensure that a pharmacist has at least one guaranteed source of genuine medicine, direct from the manufacturers. Pfizer argues that the move is not a cost-cutting exercise, and will have no effect on prices.

A Pfizer spokeswoman said: “It has been estimated that a medicine can pass through 20-30 pairs of hands before it reaches the patient.

“When we sell to wholesalers, we lose sight of where our medicines go. There is no visibility in the supply chain. We believe this change will give us much greater visibility and, if we do need to recall a medicine, we will be able to do it much more easily and efficiently than before.”

Drug counterfeiters match the packaging of the genuine product and use batch numbers on the packs that have been used by the manufacturers. This means that if counterfeits are detected, an entire batch bearing that number needs to be recalled. In July last year Pfizer had to recall 120,000 packs of Lipitor.

Last year there were 39 cases in which British medicines were found to be counterfeit, more than double the total for 2004. Pfizer says that the huge growth in parallel trade and the fact that repackaging is legal make preserving the integrity of medicines difficult.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), however, said yesterday that no counterfeits in Britain have been the result of parallel trade and that Pfizer’s change to its distribution arrangements was a commercial decision by Pfizer.

“We share Pfizer’s concern about increasing conterfeiting in the legitimate supply chain and regularly meet them and other drug companies to discuss the issue” a spokeswoman said.

“We take it very seriously, and that is why we have one of the largest anti-counterfeiting teams of any of the regulators.”

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