Counterfeit-drug crisis hits home hard
Physically and psychologically, Laura's first hospital stay had been bad enough. Unfortunately, after the surgery, no one had told her to stop taking her birth control pills because of the risk of clotting. Now, with oxygen in her nose and terms such as "deep vein thrombosis," "emergency lung scan" and "pulmonary embolus" wafting past her ears, my relative got downright nervous. Then came the final blow. As soon as a nurse started her anticoagulant drip, Laura thought she was dying.
"I never felt so terrible in my life," she later recalled. Sweaty and breathless, her chest and bowels heaving, she pressed her call button and yelled for help.
After a hurried, late-night discussion, Laura's doctors finally stopped her intravenous heparin and began a different blood-thinner — at which point my exhausted cousin felt better and fell asleep.
Since then, the circle of victims has grown wider and the facts of the case uglier. Patients in 10 other countries (Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and New Zealand) are known to have received the adulterated compound. Most likely, the substitution of oversulfated chondroitin sulfate for genuine heparin, an expensive biologic normally harvested from pig intestines, was an act of economic fraud. Or, you might say, manslaughter.
This latest chapter in the global trade of fake or altered pharmaceuticals should send shivers down many spines. For years, even jaded medical consumers assumed that drugs prescribed to the sickest of the sick carried some seal of potency and purity. Guess again. Today, the $650 billion international pharmaceutical industry is quick to purchase ingredients and produce drugs wherever costs are low, opening the door to periodic disasters in every corner of health care, including hospitals.
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Doctors are dangerous | May 18, 2008 at 2:07 p.m.
