Bad news for those of us ordering from India. This reminds me of Bryan Johnson’s abruptly ending his stay in India because of air pollution levels there. I wonder if it is these pollutants that are creating issues with the drugs.
The results do not mean that all drugs made in India are of poor quality, or that the US should stop buying generic drugs from foreign producers.
The data included other countries too, but the core finding was “generic drugs made in India, where a majority of emerging economy generic drugs are made, experience significantly more SAEs than equivalent generic drugs made in the US, where a majority of advanced economy generic drugs are made.”
What the results do suggest is that the FDA’s claims that generic drugs are interchangeable may not necessarily hold true in all cases. Generic drugs may have the same active ingredients, the same dosage form, and the same routes of administration, but that doesn’t mean they are made with the same best practices.
Manufacturing operations and supply chain activity could be impacting the quality of these meds, making it more likely that a patient experiences severe side effects.
“There are good manufacturers in India, there are bad manufacturers in the US, and we’re not advocating for ending offshore production of drugs or bashing India in any way,” says business analytics researcher John Gray from OSU.