When my cat isn’t distracting me with his exotic dance routine (he’s just trying to get through catnip tasting school okay!? don’t judge!) I do research on subjects that help bring to light things our awesome Patient Worthians want to hear or learn about.
But all joking (and cute cats) aside… We must get to talking about the issue at hand. An article from CNN that read, “Why is $3 Billion worth of cancer drugs being thrown away?” take a second to let that sink in……
Pharmaceutical companies are producing vials of life saving cancer drugs in sizes smaller than the average recommended dosage, hospitals are then buying these drugs, providing the dosage, and throwing away the rest. In some cases, hospitals are using the remaining medication on another patient, but this is not the norm, it is the exception.
“Merck sells a melanoma drug, pembrolizumab, called Keytruda, in vials that contain 100 milligrams of the drug. A 150-pound patient gets about 140 milligrams of Keytruda, meaning that more than half of the second vial would not be used.”
That’s roughly $200 million dollars in wasted life saving medication each year. Takeda Pharmaceuticals is another offender that enables this type of waste. Their drug, Velcade, comes in 3.5 milligram vials, but the average patient only needs 2.5 milligrams. Not only do they enable waste, but Takeda has also been known to hide or ignore serious side effects of their drugs for which they were fined nearly $6 Billion in a settled case last year.
The point here is not to bash pharmaceutical companies, the point is to get a conversation going and raise a voice to something that needs to be changed. No matter how sad it may be that despite all the technological advancements and good that pharmaceutical companies do in communities around the world, they erase all that good with actions such as this, actions that reflect the deep seeded greed and bottom-line-over-the-patient agenda that they are so well known for. As they say in my native region, “borran con el codo lo que hacen con la mano“, in English, “they undo with one hand what they have done with the other”, so no real change is ever accomplished.
It’s not until we take the stage and fight against greed and putting the bottom line in-front of the patient that things will begin to change. It’s up to us to raise our voices and put a light on actions like this that are detrimental to all of us!
Have something to add to this story? let us know in the comments below!
