Battleangel

Those that dismissed RFID security and privacy concerns out of hand and placed it in the tin foil category might want to take a look at this latest development.

Plans to track the movements of once-free Americans continue to march forward. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are being put into everything from your passport to your pets. Plans to tag immigrants - even legal ones - are already being discussed in Washington. Now, one of the world’s leading drug makers is tagging HIV patients.

GlaxoSmithKline has begun placing RFID tags on all bottles of their drug Trizivir, given to HIV-positive patients in an effort to keep AIDS from developing. Now anyone carrying the medication can be tracked.

It doesn’t take much of an effort or an inclination for the conspiratorial to see how this could be misused. Plus it ties in with immaterial law as the rationale for the tagging is that Trizivir is “among the 32 drugs most susceptible to counterfeiting.” Well, for starters, this field test is only going to happen in the US currently, where counterfeiting is not such a monumental problem as GSK and the FDA would have us believe. It is also difficult frankly to envision how exactly this will stop people from buying and selling counterfeited drugs. It all sounds nice and all when inside the supply chain of GSK, which probably works well in the US, but again, that is not where counterfeiting is rife. And one would also have to sharply distinguish between “fake” and “real” drugs, as the WHO definition explains:

Counterfeit medicines are part of the broader phenomenon of substandard pharmaceuticals - medicines manufactured below established standards of safety, quality and efficacy. They are deliberately and fraudulently mislabelled with respect to identity and/or source. Counterfeiting can apply to both branded and generic products and counterfeit medicines may include products with the correct ingredients but fake packaging, with the wrong ingredients, without active ingredients or with insufficient active ingredients.

I have no sympathy for pharma going after generics or counterfeited drugs with the correct ingredients obviously. Which is what they probably will do using these sob stories as a cover. The entire plot reeks of dishonesty and the introduction of RFID tagging is just too convenient.