Not long ago, the global crisis in tainted and counterfeit drugs hit home for me. My cousin Laura - high-octane teacher, wife and mom - was rushed to her local emergency room. Six weeks earlier, she had had surgery for a broken tibia and fibula. Now a vein in her leg had clotted, and she needed immediate, high-dose anticoagulation.
Physically and psychologically, Laura's first hospital stay had been bad enough. Unfortunately, after the surgery, no one had told her to stop taking her birth control pills because of the risk of clotting. Now, with oxygen in her nose and terms such as "deep vein thrombosis," "emergency lung scan" and "pulmonary embolus" wafting past her ears, my relative got downright nervous. Then came the final blow. As soon as a nurse started her anticoagulant drip, Laura thought she was dying.
"I never felt so terrible in my life," she later recalled. Sweaty and breathless, her chest and bowels heaving, she pressed her call button and yelled for help.
After a hurried, late-night discussion, Laura's doctors finally stopped her intravenous heparin and began a different blood-thinner - at which point my exhausted cousin felt better and fell asleep.
Did Laura dodge a bullet? We'll never know for sure, but it seems likely. Just weeks before her bizarre reaction to the popular blood-thinner, a tainted batch of heparin containing a raw ingredient from China - a man-made chemical that mimics heparin but is far cheaper to make - had started to flood American hospitals. The only problem was then, no one knew. Another two months would pass before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, responding to hundreds of serious reactions and deaths, broadcast the news and ordered a massive recall of the life-endangering product.
Since then, the circle of victims has grown wider and the facts of the case uglier. Currently, patients in 10 other countries (Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and New Zealand) are known to have received the adulterated compound. Most likely, the substitution of oversulfated chondroitin sulfate for genuine heparin - an expensive biologic normally harvested from pig intestines - was an act of economic fraud. Or, you might say, manslaughter.
