Killed by the Cure

Today the number of people who have died from fungal meningitis from a tainted steroid rose to 12, 137 have been infected and thousands have been exposed. The drug was made by the New England Compounding Center, which is basically just a pharmacy. Since it claims to be a pharmacy it escapes regulation by the FDA, and is instead regulated by a patchwork of state regulations. This despite the fact that this company makes huge batches of this stuff to sell to clinics nationwide, rather than for individual patients the way pharmacies are supposed to.

Now, the interesting thing about this compounding pharmacy is that it's owned by a guy named Gregory Conigliaro, who also owns an FDA-registered drug manufacturer called Ameridose, as well as real estate and recycling companies. It appears that Mr. Conigliaro is using New England Compounding to get around FDA regulations to make a killing on a drug that the big pharmaceutical firms have jacked the price up on. He seems to have decided to manufacture this drug in the back room of his pharmacy instead of in the FDA-monitored clean rooms of Ameridose.

The FDA has tried to control this kind of drug compounding for years, but conservatives in Congress stopped them and pharmacies in Texas and across the country sued to escape FDA regulation.

And this isn't the only recent instance of tainted substances being injected into hundreds of people. Last August there was a rash of infections from tattoo ink tainted with bacteria.


Conservatives have been on the warpath about deregulation, and unregulated compounding pharmacies are exactly the sort of thing they've been pushing. And this is exactly the kind of result we can expect when conservatives get their way.

They like to say that health care is just like any other kind of consumer business. Government should get out of the way and let businesses rise and fall on their own merits: if they screw up the marketplace will sort it out.

But when companies in the health care business take short cuts to boost profits people die. This tainted drug could have killed tens of thousands of people; we're just lucky that it's only a dozen. So far.

But this situation shows how fallacious the conservative argument against all regulation is. The people injected with this drug didn't get to choose its source. Tortured by agonizing pain, they went to their doctors for relief. They (and probably their doctors) had no idea that they were being injected with a drug made by a cut-rate compounding pharmacy run by some real estate wheeler-dealer. And now they're dead.

When medicine consisted of barbers amputating broken legs you could probably get along without regulating health care and drugs. But in this day and age, with tremendous advances in medical science and technology, and interstate and international transportation of drugs and medical devices, it's extremely difficult for consumers of health care to make any kind of informed decisions on what treatment is right for them, much less about the fitness of all the components of any procedures they undergo, which may involve hundreds of different medical instruments, drugs and devices that pass through half a dozen middlemen.

When you're suffering from agonizing back pain, the last thing you need to worry about is being poisoned or infected by the very drugs that are supposed to cure you. Someone with some muscle needs to keep on eye on the people who are making the stuff that gets injected under our skin and into our spines.