United States: A recent study shows that illegal online pharmacies are selling fake or poor-quality Ozempic and here in some cases, taking money without delivering any kind of product. Tim Mackey from the University of California, San Diego, said it’s hard to know how common these scams are.
The situation varies depending on the availability of ingredients and the types of counterfeiters, with some selling products with no active ingredients, incorrect ingredients, or not delivering anything at all.
Scams and Dangerous Products
For the last summer, Mackey and his partners searched for the websites advertising semaglutide without a prescription, and this is the active ingredient in the Diabetes drug Ozempic and the weight loss drug Wegovy both require prescriptions.
As reported by New York Post, “Three vendors selling Ozempic injections engaged in no delivery scams requesting extra payments (range, US USD 650- USD 1200) to purportedly clear customs, confirmed as fraudulent by customs agencies,” the researchers wrote in their findings which is already published in Jama network open.
The study authors reported that semaglutide was present in the three samples sent to them but the purity varied (7% to 14% versus the advertised 99%) and the amount of semaglutide exceeded what was on the label by 29% to 39%.
Rising Overdose Cases and Health Risks
Also, the overdoes of Semaglutide have become the commonplace and US poison centres fielded nearly 3000 semaglutide calls from the January to November 2023 however the 15 times of the amount in 2019.
Although the US Food and Drug Administration makes an alert last week about the semaglutide overdoses.
Here are some of the patients had to be hospitalized and with the symptoms ranging from the nausea vomiting and abdominal pain to fainting, headache with migraine and dehydration to the acute pancreatic and gallstones.
Illnesses will likely become more widespread as the counterfeit market expands along with the Ozempic’s growing popularity.
High Risk from Illegal Online Pharmacies
Mackey pointed out there are about 30,000 to 40,000 active illegal online pharmacies, which could get in on the action. People who try to buy unauthorized Ozempic online risk getting a product without semaglutide, the wrong amount of semaglutide, a dangerous ingredient instead, a contaminated product or no product at all.