Prep from India

[jdubya]

I recently had a prescription filled via TeleRx for prep and they sent me bottles from Camber Pharmaceuticals, Hetero Labs, based in India. Does anyone know if this is legit?

[viking8x6]

Yes, that's fine (my Truvada Rx came from the same place). A lot of the big manufacturers of generic pharmaceuticals are in India.

[jdubya]

Thanks for the reply. I figured I would get a lot of impulse, quick type responses, so nice to see real information. I do see some groups have studied overseas medications and their ingredients. 

[Rillion]

Pretty hard to avoid as half of all generic prescriptions drugs used in the US are manufactured in India. There was a study last year that made headlines with what looks like a shockingly high number, but it's hard to find the actual numbers to put it in context. 

The study found that generics manufactured in India had a 54% higher rate of severe adverse events reported through the self reporting system. But this study was done by US and Korean researchers of roughly 2500 generic drugs, which likely means there millions of people using these drugs. What I haven't been able to easily find is how many severe adverse events (sae) were reported by each group (developed world generics vs primarily Indian generics). Since there is roughly a 50/50 split, if out of a million people taking developed world had 100 sae's, then that means out of the group of a million people taking generics from India 154 had sae's. Or 0.01% vs 0.0154% chance. Or an additional 0.0054% chance of a sae. 

Now if instead there were 100,000 sae's out of 1 million vs 154,000, now we are taking about 5.4% increased chance of a sae. Percentage increases of percentage chances end up highly dependent on the base percentage. 

Statistically these two scenarios are similar but you'd probably choose differently:

Scenario A - pay twice as much for a drug that will only have a 10% chance of harming you versus the cheaper option which has a 15% chance of harming you.

Scenario B - pay twice as much for a drug that has a 1 in a million chance of harming you or half as much for a drug that has a 1.5 chance on a million to harm you.

 

Edited 12 hours ago by Rillion

[Tiboer]

Didn’t know about Telyrx!  Thanks