While Big Pharma uses disinformation to fight bacterial infections and the flu in the US, they could be fueling superbugs in India while peddling bad drugs. This is becoming a global epidemic that can only be resolved by actually sharing realistic information about the drug companies.
According to ARS Technica, in August of 2016, doctors in Washoe County, Nevada, found that one of their patients couldn’t shake a bad bacterial infection. The infection had likely taken hold years before while the local woman was on an extended visit to India. While overseas, she had undergone multiple hospitalizations and surgery for a leg injury and eventually developed a bone infection. By the time she got back to Nevada, the infection had spread. The doctors in the United States isolated her in a hospital room and threw all the antibiotics in their arsenal at the infection. It resisted all of them—26 in total, tests confirmed. In early September, the woman developed septic shock and died.
ARS Technica then went on to say that this highlights two very important points: that drug-resistant bacteria don’t stop at borders and that India is of particular concern in the fight against antibiotic-resistant infections. While cases of drug-resistant bacterial infections are rising globally, recent data shows that India has among the highest rates of such infections in the world. The country is also the largest consumer of antibiotics per capita.
But, new data is showing why India appears to be the breeding grounds for antibiotics resistant strains, and it’s all the fault of Big Pharma and their “money before people” philosophy. Drug companies (Big Pharma)are selling millions of dubious and unapproved cocktails of antibiotics in India. All of these could spur the development of drug-resistant bacteria and imperil patients. The finding, published Monday in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology by UK health experts, suggests that the country poses a risk to global health and undermines efforts to control drug resistance. But not because India is inherently unsafe, but because drug companies take advantage of India’s bacterial infections.
The study authors, led by Patricia McGettigan of Queen Mary University of London, recommend firm regulatory action within India to ban these unapproved drug cocktails. They also call for the multinational drug companies producing some of the antibiotic mixtures—such as Abbott, GlaxoSmithKline, Astra Zeneca, Pfizer, and Merck/MSD—to be accountable for their products.
Drug companies “should be required to justify the sale of products in India that do not have the approval of their own national regulators and, in multiple cases, not even the approval of the Indian regulator,” they conclude. –ARS Technica
When reading closely, it can be summarized that drug companies are responsible for the global outbreaks of the antibiotic-resistant strains of infections. But that’s not all. Dosages could also present a problem. The researchers found that drug companies sold 86 regular, so-called “single-dose antibiotics” and 118 “fixed-dose combination” antibiotics over the five-year period. Many of the 118 doses sold in India were “poorly considered,” the authors note. Some combined antibiotics that needed to be taken at different intervals to work
But expecting drug companies to care about the health of their consumers is like asking the government to care about the freedom of their people. The more people Big Pharma hooks on drugs, the more money they make. The more communists the government hooks on their totalitarian programs, the more money the government makes. Putting two and two together to get four is now up to us.
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