About £28.000 erectile dysfunction tablets were sized by the Police and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.

Homes in Albert Street and Moor Lane in Loughborough, Leicestershire and Frazier Street in south-east London, were raided.Two men have been arrested and are being questioned by police.

Danny Lee-Frost head of operations at the MHRA Said the MHRA are committed to finding those attempting to deal with falsified medicines. It is the role of the MHRA to ensure the public have access to acceptably safe medicines and this action has prevented potentially unsafe medicines from reaching the public.

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is the government agency which is responsible for ensuring that medicines and medical devices work and are acceptably safe. The MHRA is an executive agency of the Department of Health.

The multi-billion-pound global trade in bogus medicines is responsible for an estimated half a million deaths a year as Europe becomes an ever-more lucrative target for counterfeiters. Fake pharmaceutical Drugs – whether sold directly over the internet or infiltrated into the neighbourhood pharmacy or local hospitals – have become a huge and fast increasing threat.

In 2005, 500.000 single doses of fake medicines were discovered across Europe. The following year that number had shot up to 2.5 million.

Counterfeit medicines are easy to produce, low risk and vastly profitable. A drug costing a fraction of a penny can be sold for 50 times as much and more.

Steven Allen a former officer with the National Crime Squad and senior director of global security at Pfizer, the world’s biggest pharmaceuticals company whose drugs Viagra and the cholesterol reducing Lipitor top lists of counterfeited medicines says ‘The chances of detection are pretty low and the penalties don’t really fit the crime. If you are bringing in cocaine or heroin, you are going to prison for the rest of your like. At the moment if you are smuggling in Viagra or other ED drugs like Cialis, you may get a slap on the wrist and a fine.

The trade extends far beyond Viagra and other erectile dysfunction medications. Virtually all medicines have been counterfeited. Increasingly, criminal gangs have moved into lifesaving medicines including antibiotics, antiretroviral drugs for Aids and expensive cancer and infertility drugs. At the height of the bird-flu scare, fake doses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu were unleashed on the world market that just obtained vitamin c and lactose.

The MHRA and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society collaboratively conduct spot checks at pharmacies and distributors.

The number has been stepped up and concentrates on the “hot list” of most-faked drugs, but the total number of batches examined is still in the low thousands, a tiny proportion compared with the 750 million prescription items dispensed each year.