October 16, 2009
If you're worried about swine flu, resist the temptation to stock up on dubious medicines being hawked online.
The Food and Drug Administration ordered a bunch of stuff on the Web recently that was supposed to fight or prevent the flu and doesn't recommend you do the same.
One package from India that should have contained the flu-fighter Tamiflu, or oseltamivir, instead had some plain, white tablets that turned out to be a mixture of talc and acetaminophen. The Web site where the meds were offered "disappeared" shortly after the FDA placed its order, the agency said.
Other shipments included products that contained some oseltamivir but they weren't approved for sale in the US.
The FDA has come up with a neat little widget (check it out on the right) to help people separate the impostors from the real deals when it comes to H1N1 products.
The proliferation of scams doesn't exactly surprise us. A few months back the cosmopolitan cops at Interpol blew the whistle on swine flu spam, saying as much as 4 percent of spammy email at the time was about swine flu.
Add the swine flu stuff to that folder where you keep the Nigerian get-rich-quick schemes. "By responding to spam swine flu emails or attempting to order medication online through illegal and unregulated websites, people are risking their well-being and their money," Interpol's Jean-Michel Louboutin said in a statement in May.
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