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  3. The next time you’re tempted to buy Lipitor or some other medication online, ponder this: there’s a high likelihood that what yo

The next time you’re tempted to buy Lipitor or some other medication online, ponder this: there’s a high likelihood that what yo

admin2012-05-28  31
问题     The next time you’re tempted to buy Lipitor or some other medication online, ponder this: there’s a high likelihood that what you buy will be fake. The pill or vaccine may contain a much smaller dosage than stated, or it may lack any active ingredient whatsoever. Worst of all, it could be toxic. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 50% of drugs sold online have either been faked or altered in some way. And Internet sales are just the tip of a much bigger problem. Falsified medicines are especially prevalent in developing countries; the WHO estimates that up to 30% of drugs sold in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America are fake.
    The issue has long been a preoccupation of major pharmaceutical (医药的) companies, which lose as much as $75 billion in business every year to counterfeit-drug (假药) makers, according to WHO estimates. In 2002, the industry set up a Washington-based agency called the Pharmaceutical Security Industry, run by Thomas Kubic, a former FBI deputy assistant director, to try to tackle the problem. And four years later, the WHO launched an international task force dedicated to the issue. But so far, such efforts have merely highlighted the growing trade. The Pharmaceutical Security Industry tracked more than 1,800 incidents of drug-counterfeiting around the world last year, 10 times the number when it first started monitoring seven years ago. Getting governments and law enforcers around the world to work more effectively to counter the problem has proved hard.
    But that may be starting to change. On Monday, the Presidents of two African countries, Thomas Boni Yayi of Benin and Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso, will be among a cluster of international dignitaries and industry experts who will make an international call for action against counterfeit drugs. The larger goal is to establish an international convention on counterfeit drugs as early as next year.
    Certainly, there’s now an abundance of evidence of criminal activity. Many times, the counterfeit drugs just don’t work. This leads to a large number of preventable deaths, particularly in the developing world.
    The problem is not limited to poor countries, however. When Pfizer recalled 120,000 packs of its cholesterol drug Lipitor in Britain in 2005 after it discovered a counterfeit version, it found that 60% of all the returned packs were fakes.
    The major pharmaceutical companies have been at the forefront of the campaign to crack down on the problem. All have growing security divisions that track illegal medicine-trafficking and gather evidence to give to law-enforcement agencies to help them take action. Pfizer has also started experimenting with safer packaging. For example, all its Viagra blockbuster packs in the U.S. now have a radio-frequency-identification tag. Merck, meanwhile, is funding the distribution of minilabs to developing countries to improve detection of fake ingredients in drugs used to combat malaria, HIV and tuberculosis.
    But experts say governments also need to step up enforcement of laws in order to effectively tackle the problem.  
What can we infer from the passage?
选项 A、Some non-toxic fake medicines kill patients indirectly for delaying the cure.
B、The laws towards fake medicines have already been strong enough.
C、Drug companies in rich countries don’t think their drugs can be faked because of the technology.
D、Drugs should be allowed to sell only in hospitals.
答案A
解析 第四段说很多时候，假药一点效果都没有。这导致了大量可预防的死亡，特别是在发展中国家。由此可以推断出无毒的假药由于拖延时间而耽误了病人的治疗，间接杀害了病人，故答案为[A]。末段专家说，政府还需要加强执法力度以有效地解决这个问题，由此推断针对假药的法律还不够完善，[B]项错误。
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