Global Health Institute

Dr. Pierre Buekens, CUGH board chair and dean of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, spoke on mega trends in global health, setting the stage for CUGH. He started by saying that "addressing global health concerns benefits all countries, including the United States". At the same time, he pointed to the new threats to global health parallel to the old ones—from non-communicable diseases to massive environmental degradation and climate change. On the other hand, the political changes bring great uncertainty in the narratives and founding of the research and educational efforts on global health.

One session I found particularly interesting was the one on "Fake Medicines: An Unseen Threat to Global Health." Speakers ranged from scholars, researchers, and vice presidents in pharmaceutical companies to policymakers in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Each of them brought a piece of the puzzle that presented for us the theory, the studies, the market operations, and the according government reaction on falsification of medicine. Generally speaking, while regulating fake medicine, the crucial nodes to look for are manufacture, transportation, transit, supply chain (wholesale), and sales. Each node points to a different set of countries and perpetrators. Perpetrators don’t target a specific company or certain kinds of medicines, but every type of medicine that has an established market reputation. When asked to distinguish the real pill from the fake one, half of the audience was wrong, who generally had much more training on health issues than the public—let alone the patients from low-income counties. An important distinction here is that the source of problem means different things for the developed and developing countries. In the developed countries, supply chain and sales are the vulnerabilities. Fake medicine took advantage of the shortage of medicine and rarely regulated online pharmacies. Whereas in the developing countries, problems flag at all stages from manufacture, transportation, transit, and supply chain, to sales.

The sickness of the patient who took the fake pill masked the scale of the problem and presents not a small challenge for the researcher or industry effort to depict and combat this issue. The fact is that when a cancer patient dies, families assume the death results from the disease, rather than the medicine,that is fake.

Xinyi Shen (McCourt'17) is a graduate student studying public policy, focusing on healthcare policy, at Georgetown University.