No warning system for fake medicines

For months, Rick Roberts had been injecting himself with the drug Serostim to reverse the debilitating weight loss associated with HIV. Then suddenly the injections began to sting.

“I was a little worried about infection,” said the 40-year-old communications professor at UC San Francisco. So when he went to pick up another batch of the vials, he mentioned the side effect to his pharmacist. “Very nonchalantly he said, ‘Oh, you ought to check. You may have gotten some of the fake stuff.’ I said, ‘What? Fake stuff?’ I couldn’t believe my ears.”

Roberts found that he had in fact received bogus Serostim. Alerts had gone out to pharmacies, but there is no system in place for notifying individual patients, even though the drug is used by a relatively small number of people nationwide.

“If there’s something wrong with the transmission of your car, the manufacturer is required to recall every car,” said Roberts. “But no one is required to notify patients when a drug they’ve been taking turns out to be counterfeit.”

When he tried to find out what the vials contained, he hit a wall of silence.

“The drug manufacturer couldn’t tell me. The FDA wouldn’t tell me. I talked to my doctor, and even she couldn’t find out. I had nightmares that the vial contained something deadly, or that it had been contaminated with hepatitis C.”

It took him several months to learn that the counterfeit version he had taken contained a female fertility drug.

Roberts has stopped taking Serostim. But like many patients with HIV, he still takes a lot of medicine -- 30 pills a day.

“Before I never questioned whether they were genuine,” he said. “Now I never know. A lot of the drugs targeted by counterfeiters are the ones used by HIV and cancer patients, because they’re so expensive. Whenever I pick up new medications, I study the boxes and the vials before I leave the pharmacy counter. I’d like to think I’ll notice if something is different. But I can never be sure.”