7. Bayer
You may recognize Bayer as the maker of Aspirin. They’re one of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world. In 1984, they discovered that one of the products they were selling—a medicine to induce blood clotting—was infecting people with H.I.V. So like any responsible company, they stopped marketing it and developed a safer medicine—right before exporting all of the contaminated medicine to Asia and Latin America, where it continued to be sold. They even continued making the H.I.V. infected medicine for another few months, because it was cheaper to produce than the new version—this was again sold straight to developing countries.
Six thousand people in the US were known to have contracted H.I.V. and AIDS from the medicine—but how many died from the tainted medicine overseas? At least 100,000 units of the medication made their way to Asia and Argentina after Bayer stopped selling it in America.
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