Global Rising Tides Associated with Pharmaceuticals

Abstract

Quality-related problems in pharmaceutical products have become globalized by interactions among several events which occurred within networks involving pharmaceuticals. The events include, among others, greater prominence of pharmaceutical industries in emerging countries and complementary structures between the emerging and the developed markets; expanding wealth gap between poor and rich; remarkable progress of large-scale pharmaceutical companies in developed countries and their influential power; the group consisting of developed countries that contribute to quality improvement; the HIV/AIDS pandemic; the public health issues in emerging and developing countries; and monopoly of intellectual property rights by developed countries. Observing the events which occurred amid times of globalization that mutually interacted with one another within these networks help us to better understand the problems associated with poor quality drugs occurring simultaneously with globalization. Observing these events using data obtained from the Google Ngram Viewer provides a visual understanding of the situation in which the occurrence of these events was concentrated across several decades of globalization. The authors discuss global events which became tangled with one another and lead to the global spread of poor quality drugs, and organize and prepare the information necessary for analysis in the next chapter.