Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

The weakest link

So here's a phrase that doesn't make me feel very secure:

Many workshops that make crude heparin are unregulated family operations.

How many other chemicals used in drugs or food could you substitute for "heparin" in that statement?* Maybe I'll just sneeze today instead of taking that antihistamine.

The quote is from yesterday's New York Times article about the apparently-contaminated heparin, a story I've been following like I followed the melamine-in-dogfood last spring. Chemical mysteries fascinate me.

If indeed the oversulfated chondroitin sulfate was deliberately mixed with the heparin, I have to admit I'm impressed with the counterfeiters. Not actually being a chemist, I'm not sure how hard it is, but I think it'd take some effort to work backwards from the identity tests that the drugs companies will do on the chemical before they use it, then find another cheap chemical that won't show up on those tests. That's not a high school science fair project.

Of course, it's also evil. And if the supply chain is so long and unregulated that somebody who is so smart and so corrupt that they don't mind if people actually die can be a link in that chain...I'm not joking, that scares me.

*Not a rhetorical question, but one to which I haven't found an answer. I did see an estimate "75-80 per cent of all active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) used by US drug manufacturers are now imported, mainly from India and China, along with 40 per cent of finished dosage forms from various global locations" in this December article from in-Pharma Technologist.

Posted by Nic at March 21, 2008 08:05 AM | TrackBack