2 Paths of Bayer Drug in 80's: Riskier Type Went Overseas
By WALT BOGDANICH and ERIC KOLI
division of the pharmaceutical company Bayer sold millions of dollars of blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs ?medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS ?to Asia and Latin America in the mid-1980's while selling a new, safer product in the West, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
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Nearly two decades later, the precise human toll of these marketing decisions is difficult, if not impossible, to document. Many patient records are now unavailable, and because an AIDS test was not developed until later in the epidemic, it is difficult to pinpoint when foreign hemophiliacs were infected with H.I.V. ?before Cutter began selling its safer medicine or afterward.
But in Hong Kong and Taiwan alone, more than 100 hemophiliacs got H.I.V. after using Cutter's old medicine, according to records and interviews. Many have since died. Cutter also continued to sell the older product after February 1984 in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and Argentina, records show. The Cutter documents, which were produced in connection with lawsuits filed by American hemophiliacs, went largely unnoticed until The Times began asking about them.
nytimes.com
What a shame! I smell of a multi-million $ law suit, which is only fair. |
