Afghanistan to Utilize Blockchain to Fight Fake Drugs

Health Ministry of Afghanistan and numerous domestic pharmaceutical firms will utilize Fantom’s blockchain to fight battle drugs.

To achieve the objective, Fantom’s Opera blockchain will be utilized to monitor 80,000 units of four various pharmaceutical goods in Afghanistan. After this initial trial, the platform will be stepped up to track several products later in 2020.

10,000 joint creams, 50,000 units of hand sanitizer, 10,000 Dioacare foot creams and 10,000 Kofol tablets will be traced during the trial. The platform has been structured to resolve fake drugs in Afghanistan’s market.

Fantom stated that domestic law enforcement agencies confiscated 100 tons of fake, obsolete or below standard medicine three years back.

By monitoring the products on-chain, the company intends to establish an unalterable audit trail that guarantees the products are not adulterated or changed during the supply chain transit.

The monitored goods will carry a shipping label, which will get scanned at every single stage of the supply chain. Whenever the label gets scanned, a hash of the item name, expiration date, batch number and other relevant information will be time stamped and stored on the blockchain.

Hash, being an unalterable mathematical function that creates an alphanumeric series, will not include any product data but permits anyone to validate whether the info claimed matches with the one using which the hash had been generated.

The trial is an outcome of partnership between blockchain company Fantom and Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health and pharmaceutical company Bliss GVS, Nabros Pharma and Royal Star.

Fantom also intends to develop a blockchain powered hospital medical data administration platform for Health Ministry. In this regard, Fantom CEO Michael Kong said:

“The upcoming health record management system, utilizing our blockchain technology, should force entries into the system to be done correctly in the first place, and should keep malicious actors accountable for wrongful entries. The biggest problem in developing countries is identifying where the problem is and having solid proof to enforce upon, rather than the actual health record management systems themselves.”

Bariq Sekandari, Fantom’s director of business development, was primarily responsible for setting up collaboration with the Afghan government. He convinced the need to set up an office in the country and contracted a local group to ensure coordinated efforts on all sides.

The partnership was initially revealed last November, when the Afghan Ministry of Public Health inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Fantom. Kong and Sekandari has stated that Fantom is also having discussions with many other government organizations, but refrained to divulge further details.