Recently, Kobayashi Chemical, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that produces prescription drugs, has exposed a fraud scandal, and more than 200 patients have suffered varying degrees of health damage after taking the company’s drugs.
The local government recently issued a 116-day shutdown for rectification, setting a record for the longest shutdown of Japanese pharmaceutical companies.
The most common way for Japanese people to buy prescription drugs is to get a prescription after seeing a doctor in the hospital, and then come to the pharmacy to buy it with the prescription.
Kobayashi Chemical has recalled a total of 41 problematic drugs since December last year.
The reporter learned from a 24-hour pharmacy in Shinjuku, Tokyo that all of Kobayashi Chemical’s problematic drugs have been removed from the shelves.
Kobayashi Chemical Co. admits that due to a series of illegal operations, one of the main ingredients that should have been added to the oral antifungal drugs it manufactures for psoriasis and other diseases has been wrongly replaced with a sleep inducer component, and the amount of sleep inducers has reached 2.5 times the maximum limit in Japan.
As of early February, a total of 239 patients who took the drug reported health damage.
Some patients lost consciousness after taking the medicine, resulting in 22 traffic accidents. So far, two patients have died after taking medicine.
The Japanese media also revealed that the relevant departments learned in the investigation that Kobayashi Chemical Co., Ltd., after discovering that there was a problem with the drug, it still left the factory, and nearly 80% of the drug manufacturing records were suspected of fraud.
Most amazingly, the survey shows that Kobayashi Chemical has been fabricating quality inspection results 40 years ago, and the management of the enterprise admits that it has been in control of this situation 16 years ago, but has been allowed to this day.
When visiting Japan, domestic tourists often buy some over-the-counter drugs and daily necessities in the cosmetics store.
The liquid band-aids and children’s antipyretic patches produced by Kobayashi Pharmaceutical are more popular.
However, Kobayashi Pharmaceutical is completely different from Kobayashi Chemical Co., which was exposed to counterfeiting, and has nothing to do with the problem drugs in the incident.
Kobayashi Chemical is a generic pharmaceutical enterprise, which mainly produces generic drugs for expired patents.
Because generic drugs are cheap and can reduce the burden on patients, ordinary Japanese people often choose them.
Because of the wide audience, such a serious fraud scandal has also made many Japanese people feel angry.
With the continuous exposure of Japanese enterprise quality supervision problems and data fraud, the aura of “Made in Japan” is constantly overshadowed, and the reputation of “Made in Japan” has also been impacted and questioned.
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