Shahid added: “Medicines from unregulated providers may be faked, swapped for an alternative medicine or not meet the strict regulatory standards we have in the UK.<\/p>\n
“Patients should be wary of any provider that is offering medicines at a price that is too good to be true and are not offering any consultations before prescribing.”<\/p>\n
A survey found that about one in 10 online pharmacies have had their websites and social media accounts cloned by platforms selling counterfeit weight-loss jabs.<\/p>\n
One pharmacy only discovered their online presence had been cloned after being approached by a patient who had bought counterfeit Mounjaro from a site posing as their pharmacy.<\/p>\n
The drug was being offered for a quarter of the price.<\/p>\n
It led to the NPA urging patients to be “wary” of providers offering medication at a price that is “too good to be true”, and accused social media companies of being “asleep at the wheel”.<\/p>\n
The organisation, which represents 6,000 pharmacies across Britain, has also written to the Health Secretary Wes Streeting, calling for stronger safeguards for patients.<\/p>\n
Among pharmacies who reported these instances to social media companies, almost all (96%) said they felt the response was insufficient.<\/p>\n
The NPA has suggested the government should consider allowing pharmacies to use a specific domain name, such as pharmacy.uk, to help patients identify regulated providers.<\/p>\n
Ms Shahid added: “We need tougher enforcement action and the government should put stronger safeguards in place to help patients clearly identify regulated providers online.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shahid added: “Medicines from unregulated providers may be faked, swapped for an alternative medicine or not meet the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[163,85,46,482],"class_list":{"0":"post-402101","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-medication","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-medication"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}