Yesterday, Big Pharma bankrolled my 7am flight to DC and my subsequent MRI at the NIH. I’ve been feeling wretched, despite the experimental drug I’ve been taking for multiple sclerosis, and I wanted to know why. My return flight arrived six hours late, at 1:30 this morning. A few hours later, I got a call from the NIH. The MRI report is not complete, but so far it shows that I have one new contrasting lesion.
Question: what should I do about this lesion?
It is very likely that a course of IV steroids would zap me back into health. My neurologist claims there’s no long term benefit, but I’ll take a short term benefit if it means I’ll no longer be dizzy and nauseous and fatigued and tingly and struggling with my gait. Besides, in my personal experience, the relapses that I haven’t treated with steroids were the ones that produced the symptoms that persist. I once skipped a round of steroids so I could take a vacation in Maine. The tingling in my fingertips with every tap of the keyboard serves as a suggestion that maybe I should have delayed the trip a couple days.
A course of IV steroids is nothing to take lightly. For one thing, it’s expensive. That’s no problem. We have insurance. We have money. We can afford it.
For another thing, a course of IV steroids is physically and psychologically grueling. I’m likely to get ornery. I’m likely to get hungry. I’m not all that likely to get any sleep. My family and I will have to endure a few days of my feeling like a big fat angry monster. No problem. We’ve survived rounds of steroids before.
We’ve been lucky to survive. Because here’s the real problem: It’s a social, economic, and political matter, and it concerns you, gentle reader, and every person you know who takes or will take a drug.
You may not be aware of this, but the ingredients in our drugs are increasingly manufactured in India and China. What with illness and travel, I’ve been behind the Times, so to speak, and only just now got around to reading Saturday’s front page article, “Deal in Place for Inspecting Foreign Drug Suppliers, A Glimpse at Suppliers in Shadows Abroad.”
Apparently, “More than 80 percent of the active ingredients for drugs sold in the United States are made abroad, mostly in a shadowy network of facilities in China and India that are rarely visited by government inspectors”
This is a problem.
I don’t know where the steroids are coming from. But I do know they are typically flushed with heparin. Does the name “heparin” sound vaguely familiar to you? You might recall the scandal a few years back, when “Chinese manufacturers deliberately substituted a cheap fake for the dried pig intestines used to make the blood-thinning drug heparin. The tainted drug was linked to 81 deaths and exposed tens of thousands of people to danger. The F.D.A. never inspected the plants making the crucial ingredients, a larger problem that only now, more than three years later, may be fixed.”
What if that heparin problem isn’t fixed? Do I unwitting submit to paying for “a cheap fake” coursing through my veins? Or do I not take the drug, and continue to suffer?
Now, the whole purpose of the Times article was to celebrate a “breakthrough” in foreign inspection. There is currently legislation on the table. “The proposed solution to this problem is for generic pharma companies to pay the FDA $299 million/year to send representatives from the FDA all around the world for bi-annual inspections.”
I don’t think too highly of this solution.
There’s one other issue that’s been in the papers lately. Way too many Americans are out of work.
Why not bring the drug manufacturing jobs back to the USA?
Drugs could be more easily inspected. Americans could get back to work again. Patients like me can feel confident that the drugs we are taking will help us, not harm us. Drug companies, generic and non-generic, can avoid further scandal, like the Tylenol debacle that broke out just today.
As a lab rat, I have some inkling of all the care and expense and governmental cooperation that goes into testing a new drug. Why let that work go to waste with a sloppy end product?
I may just use my steroid fueled ornery energy to see what a big fat angry monster can do to get some real change going in the way our drugs are manufactured and inspected. I believe there’s a real opportunity for the first major drug company to tout their drugs as being manufactured and monitored right here in the USA.