i like the story about how bayer made a drug in the 80's for hemophiliacs that gave people aids. it was banned by the surgeon general but for some reason we alllowed it to be exported to europe so they wouldnt see a tiny part of there profits go to waste.
this is from the New York Times:
"The medicine, called Factor VIII concentrate, essentially provides the missing ingredient
without which hemophiliacs' blood cannot clot. By injecting themselves with it,
hemophiliacs can stop bleeding or prevent bleeds from starting; some use it as many as
three times a week. It has helped hemophiliacs lead normal lives.
But in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, it became a killer. The medicine was made
using pools of plasma from 10,000 or more donors, and since there was still no screening
test for the AIDS virus, it carried a high risk of passing along the disease; even a tiny
number of H.I.V.-positive donors could contaminate an entire pool.
In the United States, AIDS was passed on to thousands of hemophiliacs, many of whom
died, in one of the worst drug-related medical disasters in history. While admitting no
wrongdoing, Bayer and three other companies that made the concentrate have paid
hemophiliacs about $600 million to settle more than 15 years of lawsuits accusing them
of making a dangerous product."...
"Federal regulators helped keep the overseas sales out of the public eye, the documents
indicate. In May of 1985, believing that the companies had broken a voluntary agreement
to withdraw the old medicine from the market, the Food and Drug Administration's
regulator of blood products, Dr. Harry M. Meyer Jr., summoned officials of the
companies to a meeting and ordered them to comply. "It was unacceptable for them to
ship that material overseas," he said later in legal papers.
Even so, Dr. Meyer asked that the issue be "quietly solved without alerting the Congress,
the medical community and the public," according to Cutter's account of the 1985
meeting. Dr. Meyer said later that he could not recall making that statement, but another
blood-product company's summary of the meeting also noted that the F.D.A. wanted the
matter settled "quickly and quietly." Dr. Meyer died in 2001."...
"When a Hong Kong distributor in late 1984 expressed an interest in the new product, the
records show, Cutter asked the distributor to "use up stocks" of the old medicine before
switching to its "safer, better" product. Several months later, as hemophiliacs in Hong
Kong began testing positive for H.I.V., some local doctors questioned whether Cutter was
dumping "AIDS tainted" medicine into less-developed countries.
Still, Cutter assured the distributor that the unheated product posed "no severe hazard"
and was the "same fine product we have supplied for years."
Li Wei-chun said her son, who died in 1996 at the age of 23, was one of the hemophiliacs
in Hong Kong who got AIDS after using that product. "They did not care about the lives
in Asia," Ms. Li said in a recent interview. "It was racial discrimination.""
http://www.hemophilia-litigation.com/pdf/20030522_NYTimes_Blood_Factor.pdf
