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Veterinary Practice News Editorial Blog:
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Drug Contaminants Aren't Just a Human Medicine Problem
By Somyr McLean Perry
Managing Editor of Vetpracticenews.com and Veterinary Practice News
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Walk over to your pharmacy shelf and pull off that bottle of generic heparin. Who makes the brand you use in your hospital and do you know where is it manufactured?
At the end of March, the FDA said that it identified a contaminant in large batches of the blood-thinning agent. The Wall Street Journal reported that it "appears to be a chemically altered material derived from a cheap and widely available substance found in animals, particularly in cartilage."
Bogus pharmaceutical drugs are everywhere and we don't even know the full extent of the deceit by (mostly overseas) manufacturers with intensions of making big money on selling pharmaceuticals laced with harmful fillers.
Several months ago I watched Chris Hansen of “Dateline NBC” bust Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturers who were making counterfeit brand-name drugs and filling them with arsenic, road paint and other heinous substances other than the genuine active ingredients. The Chinese manufacturers caught by “Dateline” were also falsifying brand-name labels and attaching them to their bottles of fake pills, millions of dollars worth of which were sold to the U.S.
The WSJ also reported that, "In fiscal 2007, the FDA opened 31 domestic counterfeit-drug investigations, which can involve products with ingredients made overseas. There were 54 in 2006 and 32 in 2005. In 1997, there were just nine."
If these fake drugs are making their way into our human pharmacies, what makes us think they're not in our pet pharmacies?
This may be another case of taking safety for granted. We got lucky when the FDA blocked toothpaste tainted with diethylene glycol from coming into the U.S. It was the people in Panama who brushed their teeth with that batch who got the bad end of that deal.
Then there's the infamous pet food recall … we never questioned the pet-food manufacturing process until pet emergency rooms were suddenly filled with acute kidney failure patients.
I'm not saying that your enalapril, chephalexin or heparin may be tainted because their ingredients may have been manufactured in China. But the counterfeit drug trade is deep and complex, and historical precedent says that what happens in human medicine eventually trickles into veterinary medicine.
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