OT in UK: revealed: black market trade in mumps vaccine

[Guest guest]

Revealed: black market trade in mumps vaccine

Jo Revill, health editor

Sunday July 11, 2004

The Observer <http://www.observer.co.uk>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,1258759,00.html

The enormous demand for single vaccines, as Britain faces a mumps

epidemic among its teenagers, is fuelling a booming black market in the

medicines, an Observer investigation can reveal.

Thousands of parents are queueing for a single shot of the mumps

vaccine, with some of them being charged £140 a shot, because they are

unwilling for their children to have the combined MMR vaccine.

But government and pharmaceutical restrictions on the importation of the

vaccine has led to unscrupulous trading in the vaccines, with doctors

telling The Observer how it is being brought in via the 'back door' at

Heathrow, contravening import rules.

Private health clinics offering single jabs need an import licence from

the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to bring the

Mumpsvax doses into the UK. They must then specify how many they import,

and where it comes from.

Dr n Eden, who runs a fashionable private clinic at a hospital in

north London, told us how he had obtained plentiful supplies of the

Mumpsvax from a US source.

He told The Observer he had paid £40,000 in cash to a middleman to

obtain vials of the vaccine from a wholesaler in the US. He claimed they

were properly transported to the UK, using the correct refrigerated boxes.

'Between you and me, what we do is use a wholesale importer who

backdoors it to us once it is in the UK.' He said that, in order to see

it through, the paperwork states it is destined for India, Pakistan or

Afghanistan.

Eden, an ex-NHS GP who founded E-med.co.uk <http://www.e-med.co.uk>, one

of Britain's biggest online health consultations, said that all he was

trying to do was get hold of the vaccine to allow children to be

immunised and avoid the risk of sterility - a rare but serious

complication of mumps.

Other clinics said they had been offered enormous deals to import the

unlicensed vaccine, but turned them down because of fears that they

would be breaking the law.

Dean, founder of one of the largest private health clinic groups,

Direct Health 2000, said: 'It is enormously frustrating for us because

we have around 18,000 people on our books currently waiting for the

mumps vaccine.

'A lot of clinics try to follow the rules and the procedures, which mean

that we are very limited in what we can bring in.

'But there is concern that a black market is growing, because there are

clearly huge profits to be made.'

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: 'The MHPRA take very

seriously any breach of medicines legislation and will investigate any

report of an individual or company who is not complying with the

regulations around the import of unlicensed medicines.'

*

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