Negative award "Plagiarius" for brazen product counterfeiting of emergency ventilators

Hamburg – Flagrant product counterfeiting has developed into one of the most serious types of business crime. WEINMANN Emergency too has been forced to defend itself from nervy attempts at copying. The Aktion Plagiarius e.V. has given the Chinese counterfeiter AMBULANC the negative award "Plagiarius" for the fake replicas of the emergency and transport ventilators MEDUMAT Transport and MEDUMAT Easy.

Product and brand piracy is a lucrative billion-euro business for unscrupulous imitators. Nearly every industry – from consumer goods to medical devices – is affected. The price is paid by innovative companies like WEINMANN Emergency and by emergency medical services, hospitals and their patients.

The negative award "Plagiarius" was granted by the Aktion Plagiarius e.V. again this year for the 39th time. The organization calls attention to particularly brazen imitations brought to market by counterfeiters who use unfair methods and business practices. The prize consists of a black garden gnome with a golden nose which symbolizes the profit that counterfeiters make at the expense of others.

Top quality, precision and safety are indispensable in medical products like the brand-name products from WEINMANN Emergency. In the case of WEINMANN Emergency, the Chinese company AMBULANC was found guilty of product counterfeiting. This particular imitator copied several ventilators in the MEDUMAT product line and took third place in this year''s group of exposed product counterfeiters.

The copy of MEDUMAT Transport, for example, gives the impression of a valuable transport ventilator, but has a significantly limited performance spectrum in that it lacks the setting options, ventilation modes and measurements found in the original.

The product''s design, operating elements and instructions for use were copied almost exactly from the original, but were realized with obviously inferior quality. In some cases there is an enormous discrepancy between the device settings and the actually applied values and in others the alarms for patient monitoring are missing. Piracy of this sort, therefore, holds great risk for patients in emergency medical services and hospitals.