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Avastin, ye swabs!

By on March 10, 2012

Piracy is alive and well in a most peculiar area: the pharmaceutical  industry.

According to recent reports in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, counterfeit Avastin, an anti-Cancer drug used in colon and breast cancer, has turned up in this country. The source has been traced back to pharmacies and “businessmen” outside the US.

Avastin works by inhibiting the growth of new blood vessels which enable the cancer tumor to grow and spread. Because of these qualities, Avastin has also been found to be useful in the treatment of macular degeneration, a disease of the retina affecting seniors that leads to blindness. In the past, this disease was essentially unstoppable. Dame Judy Dench was recently in the news as having been diagnosed with the disorder. It is in a branch of my own family.

The counterfeit Avastin has none of the active ingredients of the real drug bevacizumab. A chemical analysis revealed it to be mostly cleaning materials. The fake vials of the injectable drug are being tested for harmful effects. This means the counterfeit Avastin is not the result of sloppy copy-catting but outright deception and ill-intent.

Since 1938, The Federal Drug Administration has done a very good job of making certain that the drugs you buy over-the-counter and take by prescription are the real deal. Prior to this regulatory effort, people took all kinds of so-called patent medicines that were actually harmful to one’s health. President Theodore Roosevelt started the effort to regulate drugs and vaccines. It was only after a number of children were killed taking a toxic sulfa mixture that President Franklin Roosevelt was able to put teeth into enforcement.

It is very likely the FDA will eventually track these fraudulent drugs to their ‘pirates’ den.’ There are already aware of large drug producing network outside the US that can get product into the US. The rising costs of medication is fueling a search for alternatives. The Avastin scandal however points up an important object lesson which should be added into the current lunacy on the topic of health care that is passing for political dialog.

Increasingly it apparent that the right-wing political extremists bent on dumping President Obama by any means available keep screaming about government interference in commerce and over-regulation. It is also clear however that these same voices also want the assurance that when they are consumers, they are protected from crooks like the ‘Avastin pirates.’

It is time for these people headed by vitriolic talking-head Rush Limbaugh, a one time drug abuser himself, to come clean. (I am sure he too wanted a guarantee that all that Oxycodone he was taking was the advertised drug.) If you want the assurance that drugs are safe, then you have to pay for it.

That may be the real object lessons of the Bush 43 years— the delusion that you can get something for nothing if you are shrewd or ‘special.’  Just like with the wars in the middle east that are winding down, just like Medicare part D, just like easy-credit mortgages, someone always has to pay.

It just shouldn’t be people down to their last hope with colon cancer and macular degeneration.  Or even drug-addicted vitriolic talking-heads.

Rush to Judgment

 

 

 

 

Tom Godfrey

About Tom Godfrey

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