Bad medicine

摘要

Patients expect drugs to be safe. But even in supposedly well-run health systems, they can be useless-or deadly. Tainted steroids from a compounding pharmacy (one which mixes its own drugs) near Boston had killed n people with fungal meningitis and sickened more than 100 as of October 10th. A contaminated blood thinner, heparin, was linked to 149 American deaths in 2007-08. This year it emerged that some vials of the cancer medicine Avastin contained no active ingredient.