[ad_1]
Antibiotics, which turn potentially life-threatening infections into minor nuisances, are considered the greatest breakthrough in modern medicine.
But imagine that the supply of antibiotics in the United States is suddenly cut.
US national security officials are concerned about this scenario as they are attacking this misunderstood: the vast majority of the key ingredients of the drugs that many Americans rely on are manufactured in the United States. Foreign, mainly in China.
As the US defense establishment is increasingly concerned about China's potentially hostile ambitions, the pharmaceutical supply chain is being re-examined with scrutiny.
Watch this story tonight on "NBC Nightly News With Lester Holt" at 6:30 pm. ET / 5:30 pm CT (or check your local NBC station).
"If China closed the door on exports of medicines, their essential ingredients and raw materials, US hospitals, hospitals and military clinics would stop operating in months or even days," said author Rosemary Gibson. from a book on the subject, "China RX."
Gibson told NBC News that China could potentially "turn our medicines into weapons, they can sell us drugs without any drugs, they can sell drugs containing deadly contaminants."
Other generic drugs whose key ingredients are manufactured in China include drugs for the treatment of hypertension, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy and depression said Gibson.
"We can not manufacture penicillin anymore," said Gibson. "The last penicillin plant in the United States closed in 2004."
A Chinese manipulation of the ingredients or the medication diet may seem like a fairly distant possibility. A state-run Chinese newspaper said this week that there was little chance that the government would deliberately wound Americans by cutting off the flow of antibiotics.
However, as the trade war between the Trump administration and China warmed, a leading Chinese economist expressed the worst fears of US policymakers in March, in a speech at an annual national convention.
"China is the world's biggest exporter of vitamins and antibiotic raw materials," he said, according to a NBC News translation. "Once the export has been reduced, the medical systems of some developed countries will no longer work."
The Pentagon has noticed.
"The risks to national security associated with China's growing dominance of the global API market can not be overstated," said Christopher Priest, Acting Deputy Director of Health Care Operations and Tricare for Defense. Health Agency, to an American-Chinese advisory committee.
The Defense Health Agency provides health care and prescription drugs to the military.
A priest told the US-China Revision Committee on the Economy and Security that the National Security Council of the White House was trying to identify the most threatened drugs if the Chinese decided to 39, use the supply of drugs as a weapon. A spokesman for the CNS did not respond to a request for comment.
"Basically, we have outsourced our entire industry to China," Brig said. General John Adams told NBC News. "It's a strategic vulnerability."
Adams, who served for 30 years as a military intelligence officer, military attaché in South Korea and Deputy Military Representative to NATO, added that he thought China understood the consequences of building a pharmaceutical ingredients industry.
"I think they know exactly what they are doing and that they are incredibly good strategists, they do it, they choose their industries for the future and they have a plan."
The Congress is also focusing on the issue. Adam Schiff and Anna Eschoo, two Democrats in the California House, warned in a recent editorial, "If relations deteriorate further, the Chinese government could look for" pressure points "where it could exert excess weight or impose change in US policy Pharmaceutical ingredients could be such a vulnerability: by reducing their supply or manipulating their prices, China could push up prices for pharmaceuticals, or worse, we could experience shortages. "
Legislators intend to hold hearings soon, they said.
"We should not be held hostage by a foreign country," Eshoo told NBC News. "We need to move away from any country that holds the monopoly of the ingredients we rely on for our antibiotics – anthrax, penicillin and drugs for hypertension."
Although China does not restrict supply, there are questions about the safety of the manufacturing process.
The government said contaminated supplies, blood heparin, heparin, had killed 149 Americans, prompting the Food and Drug Administration to implement a new policy of placing inspectors in factories abroad.
But the FDA's inspection and regulatory regime is generally considered lax. A congressional survey conducted in 2016 revealed that a Chinese company that had banned inspectors was only receiving a warning letter, for example.
Last year, the FDA issued an alert regarding a carcinogenic ingredient used in valsartan, a medicine for hypertension, manufactured by the Chinese company Zhejiang Huahai, which resulted in the recall of affected drugs.
Last year, a scandal involving contaminated vaccine doses sold in China also led to the arrest of leaders of Changsheng Biotech, also accused of falsifying data during the production of drugs. an anti-rabies vaccine administered to infants.
"The FDA must make some terrible choices between allowing the marketing of defective drugs and avoiding drug shortages," said Rosemary Gibson at NBC News.
She argues that the United States should resume the manufacture of medicinal ingredients at home.
"We have many empty manufacturing facilities in the United States, and we need to refurbish them with newer technology that can actually produce drugs at a cost of up to 40 percent," she said. . "We just need an initial investment, and that will not happen without public support and public funding for that."
[ad_2]
Source link