Republished with permission of Roll Call

With cases of the H1N1 virus on the rise, the Food and Drug Administration recently issued a warning to people buying purported flu treatments over the Internet. In several instances, the agency bought what was marketed as Tamiflu, one of two leading treatments for H1N1, only to find thatthe products were not what they appeared to be.

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg made the warning plain: “Medicines purchased from Web sites operating outside the law put consumers at increased risk due to a higher potential that the products will be counterfeit, impure, contaminated, or have too little or too much of the active ingredient.” When you buy drugs online you are opening up the risk of fake or contaminated shipments. During my time in Congress, I was the chief advocate for federal regulation of Internet prescription sales, ensuring that each online pharmacy had to note its physical location, as well as the state and local jurisdictions where it was licensed. But here we are, 10 years later, and patients are still seeing the frightening and, in some cases fatal, results of buying unsafe drugs when they thought it was simply a convenience.

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