Agence France Presse

Bangkok, February 2:

The US makers of the male impotency drug Viagra see counterfeits as a growing threat to their business and are urging authorities in major fake drug producer China to rein in the copycats, the company’s CEO said today.

“The biggest issue we face is counterfeiting, much of which comes from China. This is a real threat to all of us,” Henry McKinnell, chairman and chief executive of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, told AFP in an interview.

“There are some factories in China counterfeiting our medicines in factories larger than ours,” he said in Bangkok on the sidelines of a conference on mental health challenges for Asian tsunami survivors.

“I think China needs to significantly step up their enforcement, both of patent rights and stopping counterfeits,” he said.

Pfizer is currently appealing a ruling by China’s State Intellectual Property Office that revoked the China patent for Viagra after experts there reviewed complaints by more than 10 local pharmaceutical companies.

McKinnell said he met last week with a Chinese official at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to press the case for more stringent support for patent rights and tougher crackdowns on copycat drug makers.

Pfizer’s concern stretched beyond its popular Viagra to its cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor which was also being heavily counterfeited.

John Theriault, Pfizer’s vice-president of global security, said millions of tablets of Viagra and other drugs were being seized through interdiction efforts in China but that the counterfeiting was on the rise.