Usually, when we think of eastern medicine we think of China and all of
their ritualistic medically practices like grinding up rhinoceros horn and
drinking it with tea to cure some aliment.
It was thought of as something very rare and highly sought after to cure
some of the worst medical conditions. The
issue then as it is now is where and how do the Chinese get rhinoceros horn,
and the answer usually came from exploiting the African continent since they
have the most abundant amount of this kind of animal on the planet. Now, the exploitation no longer lies with the
illegal killing, harvesting, and export of rhinoceros horn, but the import of
counterfeit medications. Medications that
are needed to prevent and cure one of most potentially controlled disease on
the planet…malaria.
It is no secret that the African continent has
issues with several medical conditions and disease, and that malaria is one of
them. To many people, this would mean to
ensure that vaccines are up to date and to have taken a full regiment of malaria
medication before visiting. But, it
seems that others have a different angle when it comes to viewing some of Africa’s
medical problems and that is greed. In this
case it happens to be larger pharmaceutical corporations producing, packaging,
and shipping counterfeit/fake malaria drugs that have little to no active
ingredient. In places like Uganda and Tanzania,
somewhere around one-third of the medications were fake or substandard to what
the package declared. This allows for a
huge profit margin to the pharmaceutical company that makes it, and prevents
the control of what should be an easily controllable disease. The truly unfortunate thing is that the World
Health Organization (WHO) has anti-counterfeiting and quality control programs
to try and prevent these kinds of things from happening. But, the problem is that without
collaboration and stronger enforcement on regulatory policies between
governments, this issue of medical counterfeiting is going to be a continuing problem.
The main reason why anyone would counterfeit anything, it does not have
to be drugs, is greed; to make more money.
It’s the reason why drug dealers “cut” cocaine down from its original,
or why someone would try to print and pass off currency. This is no different. The Chinese pharmaceutical companies that are
doing this are only out to get more money and in doing so are exploiting those
who need these kinds of drugs to survive.
This exploitation is a way of global stratification and explained using
a somewhat dependency theory. The African
continent needs these kinds of drugs, but has no ability to manufacture
them. So, a corporation in a more
developed country manufactures these drugs for the people of Africa and tries
to make a profit. When this company
realizes that the people are dependent on the medication they begin to devise
ways to make more money, wither by increasing the cost, or in this case
producing inferior product to people who really do not know better. In this case, the country that seems responsible
for the exploitation is China, and where the government may not be directly
responsible, through lack of regulations and control they are to blame.
Matt Partridge02/07/2013 at 11:20 pm
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