What to do about the boom in dangerous counterfeit drugs
The author of a new book argues that problems with substandard and counterfeit drugs are on the rise, exacerbated by an exploding global market, a widely distributed supply chain, and spotty government oversight.
In 2012, a cluster of people in Lahore, Pakistan, started dying inexplicably. Most were mid- to low-income patients who had received free medicine at the Punjab Institute of Cardiology. Within a week, over 200 people died.
An investigation found that the patients’ high blood pressure medication had been contaminated with similar-looking antimalarial ingredients. The confusion was probably unintentional—a chemical mix-up at a poorly supervised factory, but the combination of the two drugs was deadly.
Muhammad Zaman, professor of biomedical engineer at Boston University, has tackled the faulty-drug problem head-on for nearly a decade, developing a suitcase-size device called PharmaChk to help authorities in low-resource countries easily test a medicine’s purity.
Zaman, a native of Pakistan, says the incident in Lahore prodded him to write a new book, Bitter Pills: The Global War on Counterfeit Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2018), which he hopes will raise awareness of a problem that remains largely unfamiliar in the US.
He recently talked about the problem and what experts are doing to combat it.
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