08/10/2012– THE REPORT OF THE TURIN ASSOCIATION OF VOLUNTEERS «RAINBOW FOR AFRICA»
The unexplained death of a young man after an operation had the doctors suspicious
MARCO ACCOSSATO
TURIN
It is the latest affront to the Third World: fake medicines for poor countries. They were discovered in Sierra Leone - and brought to Italy to be analyzed - by volunteers from Rainbow for Africa, a Turin-based association of doctors, nurses, engineers and IT experts who work in the field of international cooperation.
They were discovered after the inexplicable death of Moussa, a 35-kilo young man who had his leg amputated: "He was the weakest of our patients - says Dr. Paolo Narcisi, anesthesiologist-resuscitator at the CTO hospital in Turin and president of the association -: despite the treatments we lost it, but also for the other boys we operated on we were unable to explain the monstrous infections we were treating and they did not react to the treatments in a place where there shouldn't be any resistance to antibiotics". A suspicion was born, which soon became a dramatic certainty: the active ingredient is missing in several drugs destined for African countries, in others it is the lack of excipients that makes the drug absolutely ineffective. "For this reason - Dr. Narcisi deduced - we were unable to cure the infections, for this reason the patients had pain after surgery despite the painkillers, for this reason the fever did not decrease after administering paracetamol". This is why the young Moussa died, killed by an infection, despite the successful operation.
