An op-ed, from the International Herald Tribune, by Dr. Howard Zucker, assistant director-general of the World Health Organization and chairman of the International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce.
A plague of bad medicine
There is a silent killer loose in the streets of every major city from Beijing to New York. Each day this menace brings the threat of greater illness and even death to sick patients living on farms in Africa and in the bungalows of South America. The source of this global epidemic is
counterfeit medicines.
Unlike counterfeit purses or watches, there is no demand by consumers for fake drugs. No one - rich or poor, Chinese, American or African - seeks them out; their victims are always duped into believing they have the real thing.
The motivation is simple: counterfeiting drugs is big business today, and quite likely the fastest growing criminal activity on earth. According to the U.S.-based Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, counterfeit drug trafficking will be a $75 billion enterprise by 2010.
Here's the rest of Dr. Zucker's commentary:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/14/opinion/edzucker.php
An important read.
A plague of bad medicine
There is a silent killer loose in the streets of every major city from Beijing to New York. Each day this menace brings the threat of greater illness and even death to sick patients living on farms in Africa and in the bungalows of South America. The source of this global epidemic is
counterfeit medicines.
Unlike counterfeit purses or watches, there is no demand by consumers for fake drugs. No one - rich or poor, Chinese, American or African - seeks them out; their victims are always duped into believing they have the real thing.
The motivation is simple: counterfeiting drugs is big business today, and quite likely the fastest growing criminal activity on earth. According to the U.S.-based Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, counterfeit drug trafficking will be a $75 billion enterprise by 2010.
Here's the rest of Dr. Zucker's commentary:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/14/opinion/edzucker.php
An important read.