When Kids Get Contaminated Cancer Drugs

Hi, this is Kendall in San Francisco, where I have been digging into how contaminated chemotherapy medicine ended up in pediatric cancer clinics. More on that shortly...

Last spring, I was talking to Paul Ndom, a doctor who has treated scores of people with cancer in Cameroon, Africa. He told me about giving chemotherapy drugs to patients, expecting the usual uncomfortable side effects, such as hair loss. Instead, he got something worse: no effect at all.

“I try to pull the hair, and nothing falls out,” says Ndom. He feared the drug he’d administered either was counterfeit or contained so little active ingredient that it was ineffective.

As diagnostic tools and access to health care have improved around the world, the demand for cancer drugs has grown.