Nearly 20% of cancer drugs defective in 4 African nations
34 comments
·June 29, 2025hinkley
energy123
The same thing happens in food processing. The low quality stuff gets sold under a different, cheaper brand, or reprocessed into another product.
I'm not going to cast stones at this practice because as always the alternative isn't some magical world where all produce is perfect, the real alternative is that it gets thrown in the trash and wasted, and everyone is worse off despite feeling better about themselves.
speff
Is this system not preferable over just trashing anything not perfectly made? Sure it would be nice if everyone can have perfectly manufactured medicine, but that's not reality. I would think something that's still likely good is still better than nothing.
Spooky23
Why should a person in Somalia suffer and die from cancer while a person in Ohio, lives, soley on the basis of where they live?
protocolture
Why should they not get access to drugs because the drugs would fail some bogus test made up by an american senator?
colechristensen
There's a difference between a few percent difference in efficacy which is understandably still marketed (the same kind of thing happens when you leave meds on the shelf a while) and meds that are no longer effective at all to a reasonable level or toxic.
xdfgh1112
Does that mean that generics really are worse than the brand pharmaceuticals. Or are they binned the same way?
In the UK I know the NHS buys generics, which implies they are effective, but I wonder.
Perenti
In my experience as a medically complicated person, generics generally work, but may have different side effects, both in scale and style. One of the worst was a duloxetine generic that came on so hard and strong that I felt serontoninised.
My friend the John the Pharmacist explained that the binders etc can accelerate absorption. His advice was be careful the first two days of a new generic formulation.
I would assume the NHS (like the TGA here in Oz) looks _very_ carefully at the side-affect profile before they buy any particular generic. Government agencies tend to try not to poison voters.
nick__m
here in Canada the active ingredient must be identical in identical quantity but the binding agents, excipient, and propellant are proprietary. The generics have to have the same bioavailability +-20%.In some drugs it doesn't matter, in others there is a world of difference.
I pay the 2$ it cost for brand name ventolin (my insurance cover the cost generic and I pay the difference) as the generic give asthma attack. But I would not pay one cent more for the brand name Vyvaanse. Effect wise the generic is indistinguishable (but damm the pills colors make them looks like a cheap gray market knock-off).
My wife has a paper from her oncologist for original femara because the generic made her faint a few times ( the insurance cover the whole cost because of that paper)
Retric
Generally it’s different companies manufacturing generics.
Instead this mostly comes down to how effective each countries regulations are.
hinkley
This is also my understanding, but perhaps I am meant to understand that to be the case.
lmpdev
Generics lack the ownership of the intellectual property, but that’s about it
Generics are effective
throwawaysleep
Generics tends to be different companies altogether.
kurthr
The political uncertainties of western countries where "there is no truth" and "facts don't matter" could easily bring this level of systemic corruption to them as well. People love to rage bait and say how bad it is now, but that seems to have largely led to groups giving up on enforcing norms, and bodes poorly for the future.
ggm
Leo Szilard (he's credited with theorising purposeful fission and patenting core ideas long before the Manhattan project got off the ground) wrote a long time ago about a (dys/u)topia where technocrats made the decisions. He had this idea "the bund" would fix politics by moving decision making to pure evidence based rational methods.
It wouldn't work, but when I see appeals to authority (FDA) enter the room, it's usually to feel superior because its a logical fallacy in argument but the place it actually fits (which btw, is here, in this thread) is that compliance to standards and policing them, is not "argument" it's the "you only had one job" part of the gig.
"yes Mr Kennedy, these friends of yours are very nice at parties, but unfortunately they are neither qualified, nor actually capable of fulfilling their role and so no, you won't be appointing them" is what the Bund would do.
Being able to take a compliance body oversight function and leverage it to remove adjuvents because of one paper, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is precisely whats wrong in the current politicised situation.
If people making generic cancer drugs for use in africa had to be held to the standards in the west, we'd all be better off. I have said elsewhere that if the US rejects flu vaccines because of the mercury, they should be checked for other compliance and standards, and subject to cold chain integrity shipped to economies who usually can't afford them, and can use them.
elcritch
Ah yes because technocrats are never prone to groupthink or missing the forest because of the trees, et cetera.
There was a fascinating article I read years back about how much of China’s top leadership had engineering degrees, unlike in western countries. Then the article pointed out how that led to things like the one-child act based on research in the 1970s predicting mass starvation. That one child policy is now leading to possible demographic collapse after causing decades of social strife.
Be careful what you wish for, as you’re possibly a variable which could optimized out.
Alternatively consider the long term ramifications of leaving pandemic responses purely in the hands of unelected epidemiologists whose primary focus is a virus and not the overall welfare of a population. Those are not the same thing after all, even if they seem like it at first glance.
IMHO, alternative means of thinking are needed in a governmental system for the best overall outcomes.
ggm
hence (dys/u)topia above. I think Szilard was off his rocker when he proposed this, it was before he had much to do with Teller. I suspect after the events of the bomb, he might have changed his mind.
(he wrote rather bad scifi about talking to dolphins. Somebody else, Pierre Boule wrote it much more sexy/exciting, that became "the day of the dolphin")
gsf_emergency_2
Too mind-fogged to help you out here..
just wanted to point ou his most famous patent, the Einstein-Szilard fridge
(considerably less famous than the Einstein-Szilard letter, so I feel there's another argument for or against technocracy right there)
ggm
Because of concerns how toxic ammonia was, and how common leaks. Turned out to be useful many decades later when they were designing the cold chain for the H Bomb before solid duterium/lithium came along.
firesteelrain
I don’t see how. FDA is widely respected.
protocolture
Is it?
Australia wont import FDA certified beef. For great reason.
thfuran
The FDA has been approving generics from factories known to have repeatedly failed prior audits or had products recalled for quality issues without re-inspecting the factories or inspecting the drugs on import. And they're doing it via a special process that bypasses the ordinary review process and over the objections of many of the inspectors.
null
navigate8310
[flagged]
manishsharan
I actually read the actual study on Lancet. unfortunately for you, your vile prejudice can not be justified by this study.
I'll never forget a coworker telling me that in a previous job hunting round he had interviewed with a pharmaceutical group that was tracking the manufacturing process for batches of drugs and comparing the little tolerance mistakes (heated a little too high or held at temp a little too long or not quite long enough) and finding a market where they can sell that batch.
You'd like to think that companies have factories with quality control laws and there are local people trying to ensure that all of their product are up to the local standards. What you don't expect is that they are binning them like Intel CPUs, where they just make a batch and hope for the best, take cream off the top until the priority orders are done and then everyone else gets whatever is left. You might get a slightly better product sometimes but not be so lucky the next time.