The Min­istry of Health (MoH), via its Drug In­spec­torate Di­vi­sion, has is­sued a warn­ing about four batch­es of HEAL­MOXY Cap­sules 500mg, which have been de­ter­mined by the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) to be fal­si­fied.

The ac­tive phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­gre­di­ent in gen­uine HEAL­MOXY cap­sules is amox­i­cillin. It is an an­tibi­ot­ic used to treat a va­ri­ety of bac­te­r­i­al in­fec­tions, in­clud­ing mid­dle ear in­fec­tions, pneu­mo­nia, skin in­fec­tions, den­tal in­fec­tions, and uri­nary tract in­fec­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the min­istry, which quot­ed a WHO Med­ical Prod­uct Alert: “The fal­si­fied prod­ucts have been de­tect­ed in Cameroon and the Cen­tral African Re­pub­lic. The alert fur­ther stat­ed that the fal­si­fied prod­ucts are un­safe and may pose sig­nif­i­cant health risks, par­tic­u­lar­ly for se­vere in­fec­tions or vul­ner­a­ble in­di­vid­u­als.”

The Health Min­istry stat­ed that the fal­si­fied prod­uct can be iden­ti­fied by the mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of its iden­ti­ty, com­po­si­tion, and source. It said analy­sis of sam­ples of the fal­si­fied HEAL­MOXY found the cap­sules did not con­tain the stat­ed ac­tive in­gre­di­ent, specif­i­cal­ly, amox­i­cillin.

And that at least two of the fal­si­fied prod­ucts dis­played in­con­sis­tent for­mats for man­u­fac­ture and ex­piry dates. Dates on these fal­si­fied prod­ucts are usu­al­ly writ­ten as day/month/year in eight dig­its (for ex­am­ple, 10/01/2027).