Across Africa, cancer medications have been found to be substandard or counterfeit. That means people are being given medicine that may not work, or that could even cause them harm.
Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.dw.com/en/nearly-20-of-cancer-drugs-defective-in-4-african-nations/a-73062221
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
I doubt it’s a problem in only Africa.
Idk Bayer made some hemophilia drugs, realized they were tainted with HIV and Hepatitis after it had started selling.
They pulled it from the US and Europe but sold the rest in Asia and Latin America.
They continued producing the medication for something like a year after admitting that it was tainted and when the updated safer version was available, they told distributors to use up the old stock before selling the new version.
Fuck capitalism.
This is pretty much absolutely true by the way:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24785997/
Although, to be fair, that was done by Cutter Labs, which sure, had been acquired by Bayer, but to be honest, Cutter Labs was rotten from the start, they were also responsible for the Cutter incident, infecting people with Polio:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1410842/
That is disgusting but not surprising behaviour, and is the sort of pure evil that people should actually be calling out big pharma for.
The full article is paywalled but Im going to contact the authors to see if they’ll share a copy.