Organic. Farm Fresh. Locally grown. These are the hot topics of sustainability. We think about these issues when it comes to our food and our health – but what about our medicines?
Global supply chains produce the cures that sustain us, with multinational pharmaceutical companies drawing on a vast web of manufacturers, raw suppliers, and compounding facilities across the globe. Safety and verification has been the name of the game for those involved in manufacturing drugs, ensuring that what we put in our bodies are the actual pharmacologically active ingredients, following (for the most part) Good Manufacturing Practices. After the infamous Heparin supply incident, where Chinese manufacturers substituted a cheaper alternative to the active ingredient in the ubiquitous blood thinner leading to multiple deaths across the world, the pharmaceutical giants have been especially attentive to guaranteeing that the correct drug is in the pill. When Auret van Heerden discussed the controversy, he traced the supply chain down to the pig farmers in China that provide the raw heparin material from porcine intestines.
Making heparin from pig intestines
When I learned about the ultimate source of the blood thinner millions of patients use every day, I immediately thought – how sustainable are the pig farmers? If this were food, there would certainly be organic alternatives, rainforest friendly heparin, or even bird-friendly blood thinners. Yet the issues of environmental impacts of the Pharmaceutical supply chain remains largely under addressed. Pioneering programs such as Business for Social Responsibility’s Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative seek to address these shortcomings, however hard data and awareness of the Carbon Footprint or conservation impacts of our medicines remains scarce. Does your monthly supply of Lipitor require more energy to manufacture than to power your home? What do you think?
In the next post, I’ll dive deeper into a single drug case study and illuminate more on just how deep the rabbit hole goes…and why the pharmaceutical industry has so much to gain by addressing these issues.
First, great blog site name! And great title for the blog post. Loved the concise blog style. The black background really pops and your usual visual graphic wizardry really shines here! Your blog is an inspiring professional post with the perfect photo. On first read, you got me thinking and I was looking forward to hearing more about either a) the dark side of the pharmaceutical industry (and this applies to vitamins too); or b) the sustainability of pig farmers. But at the end, I wasn’t sure where you were going with this. Should I be concerned that as a consumer we have no idea what we are putting in our bodies with sources coming from across the globe (e.g. no truth in labeling) and that I could be ingesting hazards? Or is the issue ensuring sustainable sources, or setting / enforcement of international standards? Should I be concerned about the carbon load contained in the true value of the meds I take? Or am I right to focus on just the lowest price?
Thanks Cathy, and everyone else, for reading. These are all topics we should be concerned about, at least from a societal perspective if not an individual one. We often have little choice in our medicines, so perhaps this is more oriented towards health professionals. They could consider transparency in supply chains among pharmaceutical companies as they would like to know what contaminants/impurities that incidentally make it into the medicines can have as an effect on the patient. Likewise for researchers and patients concerned about adverse drug reactions. There is also an issue of sustainable sourcing standards – little data exists on the pig farmers that make heparin, and many of the drugs we use come a diverse set of sources with great sustainability implications. With 2050 trends, we need to make sure all industries become more sustainable. Stay tuned for another post detailing a single drug case study to see how diverse and complex the supply chain of big pharma can be.
Very interesting blog post. It’s easy to forget the implications for sustainability in many of the things we use every day, such as medicines. I can imagine there is often very little incentive to source ingredients or components of medicines for pharmaceutical companies. That is, unless someone gets sick and there are potential lawsuits. I can imagine that the pharmaceutical industry tends to be more reactive than proactive. I look forward to your next post!
Interesting read. I have another story about the Pharmaceutical Companies. There was an amazing discussion in Congress this summer requesting that Pharmaceutical companies invest more money into studying childhood cancer drugs. The medicines required are very different than adult drugs yet the companies were more interested in putting money into Viagra since it would be a repeat purchase many times over. Whereas drugs for sick children either made them better or they died, so there was not as much of a market for them. Talk about skewed priorities.
The heparin supply incident was a real shocker. Before that crisis, I didnt realize that the drug was derived from pigs. You raise an excellent point about trying to weave sustainable practices into the pharmaceutical supply chain. Big Pharma has the clout to drive transparency and change. We just need to figure out how to get them on board.
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