A Scary Tale on Halloween

A front-page article in today's (10/31/07) New York Times exposed the scary reality about pharmaceutical ingredients exported from China: these ingredients "are often made by chemical companies that are neither certified nor inspected by Chinese drug regulators."

The frightful story doesn't end there.

The potentially harmful ingredients were being openly peddled by Chinese chemical companies at a major pharmaceutical convention this month in Milan, Italy. According to the New York Times' investigation, one third of the over 1,300 companies exhibiting at the convention were from China. Of these, several companies had been involved in recent government investigations and have a history of selling fake and, in some cases, lethal drugs. One scheduled company wasn't there -- it's owner is currently in a Houston jail after trying to sell drugs to customs agents (he was successful in getting his drugs into the European market).

The lack of regulation in China means that these chemical companies don't have to meet any drug-manufacturing standards and are easily able to export unapproved and counterfeit ingredients.

And now for the part that's really alarming:

"The substandard formulations made from those ingredients often end up in pharmacies in developing countries and for sale on the Internet, where more Americans are turning for cheap medicine," according to the Times. And unfortunately, the Times also reports that the FDA simply cannot inspect even a small fraction of the 700 or more Chinese manufacturers that may be sending drugs to the United States.

The Times' front page exposé is another chilling example of how more and more unsafe Chinese chemicals are finding their way into drug ingredients that make up the medicines bought by unsuspecting consumers. Unfortunately, consumers are buying these drugs from illegitimate sources, including many online sellers posing as Canadian pharmacies.

Kudos to the New York Times and its reporters for its great work revealing the extent to which counterfeit drugs are a serious patient safety problem that U.S. health experts believe "pose a greater threat to a broader segment of the American public," especially those buying their drugs on the Internet.

Click here to read the full investigative piece.

Click here to help protect yourself and your family by signing up for the SafeMeds email alerts of government counterfeit drug warnings.

Welcome to the Safe Medicines Blog

I heard the other day that someone starts a new blog every minute of every day or some outrageous number like that. And here I am, adding to these stats with my own – Safe Meds.

Why?

This forum allows us to discuss the issue of buying safe prescription drugs, person to person. It’s about alerting people to the dangers of fake medicines and offering solutions to this very real problem.

I’ve spent over 20 years dedicated to studying, practicing, and analyzing health care issues. And yet, it doesn’t take a medical degree to know that much has changed in health care over that time.

There are many more medicines available, and a lot more tools for docs like me to treat patients to cure disease and improve life. Thank goodness.

There also are changes that aren’t as good, with health care becoming less and less personal. Most of us don’t have the benefit of seeing the same doctor year after year, a doctor who knows us and our families and our prescriptions. Gone are the days we went to the community pharmacy to have prescriptions filled and had our questions answered by a pharmacist we knew personally and who kept track of our medicines.

Nowadays, buying meds is becoming a very different enterprise. We change doctors. We don’t know our pharmacists. We order bulk 90-day prescriptions. And often, some of us buy drugs online.

And here is where I get on my soapbox. Buying medicines on the Internet is dangerous.

Why?

There’s no one supervising who is dispensing the drug—it may not even be a pharmacist.

No one is checking that a valid prescription is being used.

No one is checking that the drug prescribed won’t react with another drug we’re taking.

No one is checking the drug quality—many are from China, which we now know have exported products from cough syrup to toothpaste to toys that are dangerous, and have been deadly, to consumers.

Internet drug sellers may simply be conmen who make money off your credit card—and in return sell you fake, poisonous, or ineffective drugs.

And the problem is—you may never know until it’s too late. You generally don’t have a noticeable change in signs or symptoms of your disease after taking a drug. You throw away the fake packaging. Your body metabolizes the material. And doctors and nurses don’t consider fakes when treatment failure occurs. They just think “Mr. Smith just died of his disease,” never considering that the drugs he bought online were the cause.

The World Health Organization estimates that up to 50% of medicines bought from online drug sellers are fake. That scary statistic shows how far we’ve come from that corner pharmacist who took care of us when we needed medicines.

Safe Meds is going to be my soapbox to discuss the very real dangers of counterfeit drugs and ways we can address this very complicated problem. I hope to hear from you.