This weekend I am attending the Partnerships in Clinical Trials conference in Vegas. I have been talking with friends about clinical trial information as I often do. Just today I was talking with Chuck in advocacy at work about supplies of drugs. He said that he had a report saying that about 80% of prescription drugs sold in the United States come from India or China. I told him that I did not expect that, and that I anticipated that the common American thought would be that drug production is complicated and therefore done in America or Europe, and that only non-complicated things come from China or India. He told me that things change quickly and that he was reviewing the available literature. I have not looked at the reports he is reading, but I found an article which mentions some of this.
There is a lot of information to which the public needs access and the source of the products in the marketplace is one of them. The global drug prescription drug marketplace is increasing becoming a set of supply chains without borders. While regulation of manufacturing within factories in countries is likely to be in accord with that country’s standards, countries tend to be less critical of their imports because for whatever reason, the controls that are in place for domestic inspection are not paralleled in imports.
It has been in the news that sometimes drugs are contaminated in production in developing countries then marketed in developed countries. I think the situation is just that the employees in developing countries are not educated to live and breathe industry regulation and bureaucracy in the same way that anyone hired in the United States would be, and even if they mean well, in the astounding economic expansion and wild demand for increased production there are economies which are hiring the best possible people but into a local work environment which does not have experience or layers of infrastructure to prevent the very small chances that something in the production could go wrong.
I am not sure what to think about this. It occurred to me that I could sit in on talks at the conference about this.