Mortality Rate Caused by Fake Drugs
by Peter Anderson SEOAt best,
intake of fake drugs cannot cure any illness. At worst, it can take a life.
Around the
world, drug counterfeiting is a huge problem. Despite the insistence of World
Health Organization (WHO) that drug counterfeiting is not a global issue
because it only takes 1% of the total pharmaceutical industry in developed
countries, deaths traced to substandard drugs bought either through fraudulent
dealers or fake online pharmacies are continuously increasing in the United
States - suppliers of which comes from Canada and the United Kingdom.
In truth,
the real scale of counterfeit medicines is still unknown. There is no existing
proof that this issue is not a global concern nor are there any warning signs
that it has caused mass killings in a certain locality. The statistics have
been vague and are altered in every different review. There are cases when it
is held accountable for deaths when it shouldn’t be and there are also other
cases where the bereaved families are unaware that it is the real culprit.
There is no way to determine its accountability.
One thing is
for sure though: While the authorities are finding a way to determine its true
nature, drug counterfeiting has become a lucrative business in the past couple
of years. True, it is impossible to know the exact numbers behinds its trade
and lethal impact. Some guesses are to as high as 700,000 deaths per year but
there is no denying the fact that it can endanger human health and wellbeing.
It is even labeled as silent terrorism since it can pounce while people are
mostly unaware.
In a review
conducted by The Peterson Group,
a non-profit organization and one of the leading sources of information on the
proliferation of counterfeit medicines, more than 30% of the total drug market
is suspect of being counterfeit. Based on the current statistics, it is not
only developing nations being targeted as well.
Between 2007
and 2008, 149 Americans were killed after taking heparin, a blood thinning
drug. In Jakarta,
Indonesia, Tamiflu, an immediate cure for simple fever killed 25 people in
the town of Menteng in a span of one and a half years. An epidemic was thought
to have caused the deaths but after a man was arrested for smuggling fake
copies of the medicine, only then did the authorities examined the remaining
Tamiflu medicines from the local pharmacies and proved it to be counterfeit. Besides,
if a relative who has heart problem dies because of heart attack, who would
blame the medicine?
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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.