VOA常速英语:打击假冒医药产品行动

Counterfeiting is has become a global event,
essentially given the proliferation of various forms of technologies.
Just a vanity Network can be counterfeited from your favorite collude to your piece of shot.
But the stakes are typically higher, when the item being counterfeited is one that has life depending implications such as a medicine.
So our company a little of a decade ago, proposed a board solution to the medicinal counterfeiting problem in particular,
that by allowing end user authentication, we can empower consumers and patients to be able to sift out a counterfeit medicine from an original one.
How successful has that probably?
We’ve seen close to about 2 billion product authentications.
That essentially means about 2 billion times that consumers have had to dispel doubts and fears,
and I’ve been able to pick the right product out of what would have been a counterfeit one.
These products will be medicines such as gripe water that a mother wants to give the baby,
or say, a contraceptive that a young person might want to take in order to avoid a possible pregnancy for instance—
all very sensitive situations.
So from the data we statistically infer that hundreds of millions of people have been impacted by our work,
and day in day out we get feedback from consumers,
who express their gratitude about how the technology has affected their lives, from the foregoing…
from these indicators who say that we’ve done very well,
we have expanded our footprint from Ghana which is a small country comparatively, to now about 14 different countries in Africa and Asia and counting.
We’ve pivoted primarily from medicine anti-counterfeiting to other areas, like agriculture for instance,
where we are now working with Ministries of Agriculture around Africa,
to see the light packs of seeds and ensure that farmers are buying the right seeds and not buying on whilom seeds,
and planting them and discovering down the line that they were sued a knockoff version of the seed that he wanted,
so from these indicators I think we can confidently say that have been being quite well.

How about our people who said that no matter what people have been able to do, companies like yours have done,
there’s still a lot out there, counterfeit medicine is all over the place, they’re dominating the market?
How much of that are you guys been able to tackle?
I would say that those concerns will be justified and for two primary reasons.
I think it was the first president of this country that said that the success of a thing must not be judged by how fighters come,
but essentially by how fighters respond to the need that was with their effort.
They should do…has to do with the fact that companies like ours and indeed many others
are working hard to their socialize speeds, cannot fix these problems by themselves.
We do require the enabling environment, we do require governmental support and governmental ownership.
If we take an pedigree for instance,
you would realize that the countries in which we’ve been able to have the significant amounts of impact,
have been the countries where the governments have been welcoming.
If you contrast, the case of Nigeria, the case of Nigeria, where we have efforts for instance, you’ll see that for instance from 2008 to 2010, we’re counterfeiting of medicines such as antimalarials and some forms of antibiotics was a ton, a ridiculous high percentage of 60 percent.
We’ve seen it dropped significantly to 12 percent by 2016 and in some of the recent estimates to four percent and falling.
That is a tremendous success story that we have been able to work with the authorities in Nigeria to accomplish.
We have not been able to do that in Ghana,
simply because we’ve not been able to set in motion the kind of patterns you don’t have seen in Nigeria.
Let’s go back to ordinary consumers.
Do they really understand our what these technology is about?
In Africa a lot of people buy their airtime…
but I think Africa has more mobile phones than any other country in the world.
Now a lot of people already vary from their mobile phone,
and the way they buy airtime is to buy a piece of paper with a set of codes on it and then to type that code into a mobile.
These people doing this system now become acclimatized to twitter already.
A solution simply leverages on that existing infrastructure.
So that all the consumer has to do is the first looking for the medicinal part that has the code,
and then to take that part and send the code by SMS or users ID,and within seconds receive information.