Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2358

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Frenkiel O.
“Bad Medicine”
Four Corners ( originally on BBC This World) 2005 Aug 29
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1445881.htm

Keywords:
fake counterfeiters Nigeria racket

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments: Some people claim that the pharmaceutical industry is over-regulated. They might change their opinions after seeing this TV program on the appalling horrors which can occur in the absence of quality regulation.

Full text:

Bad Medicine
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1445881.htm
Reporter: BBC This World

Broadcast: 8.30pm Monday 29 August, repeated about 11pm Wednesday 31
August, 2005

It’s almost the perfect crime. Fake medicines kill the most vulnerable
people – the old, the weak and the sick. Once consumed, the evidence is
gone.

And it’s extremely lucrative – a global racket worth close to $40
billion a year, according to the World Health Organisation.

The BBC’s This World program tracks some of the networks behind this
obscene but largely invisible crime. Reporter Olenka Frenkiel starts
from point of sale in Third World street markets and follows the trail
back to manufacturers who boast they can fake any drug and any packaging.

One faker explains how he bribes his way past authorities who know all
about his activities. Another offers to make a fake TB drug which,
instead of containing four types of antibiotics, will contain chalk and
paracetamol.

Doctors around the world are now wrestling with new drug-resistant
strains of TB. Fake drugs have played their part in the development of
these strains.

The tragedy sown by drug counterfeiters is plain to see. In one case an
international charity came to Nigeria to carry out heart surgery on sick
children. But the children were pumped with fake adrenalin and
contaminated drips. They didn’t stand a chance.

“Bad Medicine” – on Four Corners, 8.30pm Monday 29 August, ABC TV.
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