AM64
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Are you ever right about that. Just look at the steel and aluminum industry, they are all but gone. Now I hear that the pharma industry has pretty much decided to let China make 90% of the raw materials for our drugs. The things that have been allowed to happen in the last 30 years is insane.
Concern is also rising that the availability of medicines could soon face disruptions worldwide. An estimated 80% of all active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs)—the raw materials for drugs—are produced in China and India, according to recent testimony by Rosemarie Gibson, author of China Rx, before the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission in Washington, D.C. They include the compounds used to treat everything from bacterial infections and cancer to heart disease and diabetes. With many factories in China still shuttered, stockpiles of many medicines could soon run short.
“This is a very acute issue now,” says Michael Osterholm, who heads the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Osterholm notes there are 153 medicines people need immediate access to in life-threatening situations. Even before the coronavirus outbreak, overreliance on a small group of suppliers caused shortages of dozens of medicines every day, Osterholm says: “These supply chains are very thin.”
‘The disruption is enormous.’ Coronavirus epidemic snarls science worldwide
It goes well beyond just the recent disruption, too. Several medications were recalled over the past couple of years because they included carcinogens - some accounts made it sound like the Chinese had perhaps diddled with the process and tainted the meds in doing so. I have no idea except for greed why we trust a third world country (at least in terms of sanitation, safety, and environment) to manufacture our medicines ... you'd think we would have learned that lesson with sheet rock and other contaminated materials.