Cuba Shows Off its Latest Medicines
Photo Feature by Elio Delgado Valdes
HAVANA TIMES — The recently concluded annual Havana International Fair (FIHAV) provided Cuban pharmaceutical companies the opportunity to exhibit their leading products to foreign buyers.
Among the firms participating were Labiofam and Farmacuba whose production of medicines and vaccines, both for human and veterinary use, are exported to numerous counties after satisfying the needs of the Cuban Public Health system.
These pictures capture the products displayed at FIHAV earlier this month.
Click on the thumbnails below to view all the photos in this gallery. On your PC or laptop, you can use the directional arrows on the keyboard to move within the gallery. On cell phones use the keys on the screen.
Homeopathy is base on the notion, that through the extreme dilution of various chemicals, a valuable medicine is obtained. This is fraudulent junk science. Homeopathic remedies are useless placebos.
In a very similar delusion, Cuban socialism is based on the notion that through the extreme dilution of all human rights and freedoms, a just society will result. This too is fraudulent junk political science, and the consequences are worse than any placebo.
For once, I agree with you completely.
They have produced decent products in the past, but they have been going in downwards spiral since some of the top personalities in the industry began buying the snake oil of alternative medicine and forgetting what means to be a scientist.
Not that I have a hidden agenda against exploring alternatives, but as Tim Mitchin said, “alternative medicine is medicine that has not been proved to work or has been proved not to work. Do you know how they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine”
Sorry, but giving placebo to a cancer patient is tantamount to criminal behavior. And sorry again, but the weakest form of evidence in science is personal experience, or how scientists said: the plural of anecdote is not data.
Notice that I did not claimed that the scorpion venom is ineffective to treat cancer, my objection is the homeopathic product derived from it showcased in the main picture.
Homeopathy doesn’t work, period. Is just a lucrative industry where unscrupulous people sell water to sick people. And is not hard to verify by yourself, a 30C solution has ~1*10^ -32 molecules of active substance, This doesn’t look like much until you remember from your chemistry class that this number 9 units of magnitude less than Avogadro’s number (6.022*10^-23)
To put it in perspective, there are more radioactive uranium, cyanide and feces in a glass of properly filtered bottled water than the original substance used in the solution at 30C, yet people don’t glow green, fall death with a blue face or get diarrhea from drinking it.
Anecdote you said? Try some;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1B2aFElfjE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bg1mSo7JQM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY3-XNttnug
Or if you rather want a more articulated (and fun) argument
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U
Or if you like just the fun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
Don’t be depressed Sir. Maybe some grateful cancer survivor because of scorpion toxin, may weigh in with their personal experience. Neither you nor myself can attest to its effectiveness and I hope we never will.
For the past 15 years since this product was discovered in Guantanamo by biologist Bordeaux, Pathologist Perry and their team, thousands of people from Europe, the US, Latin America and the Caribbean, have showed up at the door of this tiny lab on Carlos M. de Cespedes street, where it was handed out for free, after studying your medical chart and determining its applicability.
Personally, I would refrain from disparaging a medication, I may still need someday in my medicine cabinet.
Bordeaux is no longer with us, but to Dr. Franklyn Perry, Thanks amigo.
Cuba’s ‘famed’ bio-tech prowess is largely hype and benefits from very relaxed testing protocols. While new US drugs may take ten or more years to finally be approved for public sale, Cuban drugs can be rushed into production in less than a year. Cuba’s ability to produce drugs at a price point accessible to Third World countries has also added to their vaulted reputation. Finally, the most respected of Cuban drugs are usually a result of partnerships with foreign drug companies. These companies are happy to allow Cuba to take credit for its production so long as the drug trials otherwise required in their own countries can be sidestepped in Cuba. Finally, there have no drugs produced by the Castros that did not already exist somewhere else. Even the much-acclaimed Herbeprot-P, is a cheaper version of already existing treatments. “Half-decent” is pretty much correct.
half-decent biotechnology ? You don’t know what the hell you talking about my friend….
Now you managed to depress me. A poor country with a half-decent biotechnology (for a third world country) resorting to homeopathic crap to treat their population with placebo is just sad. And for Cancer patients nonetheless 🙁
And even worse in the case of Cuba, with the severe shortage of conventional medication.
Well, in the bright side, blue scorpions wont get extinct anytime soon, since a singe scorpion can provide medication for like half million people.