Health Products & Food Branch Policy on Counterfeit Health Products

(Lexology – Jennifer Wilkie, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP)

By a document posted May 14, 2010, the Health Products & Food Branch Inspectorate have set out guiding principles of Health Canada’s decision making framework for identifying, assessing and managing health risks to identify the issues of counterfeit health products. In the background of this document it is set out that, while these issues of counterfeit health products is infrequent, the document is intended to focus on potential vulnerabilities into the regulated supply chain which includes manufacturing, packaging, labelling, wholesaling, importation, distribution and sale of health products.

Counterfeit health products are described as follows:

“A counterfeit health product is one that is represented as, and likely to be mistaken for, an authentic product. Counterfeiting can apply to both branded and generic products, and could relate to a product’s identity or source, could include products with the corrected ingredients/components, with the wrong ingredient/components, without active ingredients, with insufficient active ingredients or with misleading packaging or labelling.”

Read more here. Additional information is available from Health Canada here.