C is for Controversy

In a humorous news story out of New Zealand reported by Reuters, two teenagers (Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo) appear to have busted the claims of drug manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) concerning the product Ribena. Ribena, a syrupy drink marketed mainly to children, supposedly contains blackcurrants with four times the vitamin C as oranges. Instead, the young ladies found that Ribena contains nearly no vitamin C at all, and that one commercial brand of orange juice in New Zealand contained four times as much Vitamin C as Ribena. The young ladies brought their research to the attention of the company, but it was ignored until the research reached New Zealand's Commerce Commission, which has charged GSK with fifteen counts of various malfeasance, with potential fines around $2.1 million.

This particular humorous case raises some interesting questions about drug labeling. Companies like GSK are extremely powerful, with drug marketing efforts (through direct commercials as well as employing doctors as drug peddlers) that may not serve the interests of the consumer at large. After all, the two expenses that continually outpace the rate of inflation are health care and higher education.

One of the ways in which drug companies like GSK were thought to be superior to snake-oil peddling alternative medicines/vitamin supplements is that medicines were supposed to contain a humorous array of comments about varying results and side effects and so forth. That is, products that drug companies market are supposed to be honest, at least to the level of honesty we would expect from buying used cars from a dealer (with an automobile manufacturer's logo over his business) rather than from a guy on the side of the road.

However, it appears that a product marketed mainly in British nations (it first achieved fame as a drink distributed to British youth during WWII) is merely an overly expensive form of soda rather than a health drink of any kind. Make of that what you will. However, give praise to two plucky and creative young people in New Zealand for their work in refuting some spectacularly false claims about the health benefits of a drink marketed by a drug company. The world needs more people like those two, because it has all the snake oil salesmen it can handle.