In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper, I assessed the quality and price of drugs procured through Internet pharmacies.
The deaths in Chhattisgarh have drawn attention to India's mass-sterilisation programme, as well as weak quality-control standards for drugs procured by state governments.
BPM reenacts how Act Up activists made this future possible, through die-ins on city streets, breaking into pharmaceutical company offices to throw balloons of fake blood, protests in government offices, and the pooling of lifesaving drugs procured through clinical trials.
Brand companies have provided a substantial percentage of the drugs procured including most second line ARVs studied.
85% of the generic drugs in the sample were manufactured in India, where the majority of the drugs procured were ineligible for patent protection.
Through this program, quality-assured second-line TB drugs procured through the Green Light Committee Initiative GLCC) [10] were available to patients diagnosed with MDR-TB.
The spectrometer created a detailed spectral "fingerprint" for each reference standard, which was then compared against spectral readings from drugs procured over the Internet.
The drugs procured in this study were readily available over-the-counter without a prescription in Delhi and Chennai pharmacies, including all anti-infectives shown in Table 1.
In order to compare the quality of drugs procured from websites subject to different levels of regulatory supervision, the authors intended to stratify the sample into four groups: "approved," "legally compliant," "not recommended," and "highly not recommended" (See Appendix S1).
While a larger sample size is needed to make broad conclusions, findings suggest that drugs procured from so-called "cheap" website pharmacies may not always be less expensive than more reputable websites, or at least in the case of Viagra®, even less expensive than physical-location pharmacies.
