Word: problems
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...years, Richard Pierre found job candidates on popular work-search websites with postings for positions like a $70,000-a-year gig to be a programmer analyst in Toronto. The problem: Pierre wasn't an employer but a huckster who wound up stealing personal information from dozens of job seekers, fraudulently opening 44 credit cards and racking up some $300,000 in charges...
...lack any active ingredient whatsoever. Worst of all, it could be toxic. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 50% of drugs sold online have either been falsified or altered in some way. And Internet sales are just the tip of a much bigger problem. Falsified medicines are especially prevalent in developing countries; the WHO estimates that up to 30% of drugs sold in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America are fake, including ones used to fight diseases like malaria and tuberculosis...
...which lose as much as $75 billion in business every year to counterfeit-drug makers, according to WHO estimates. In 2002, the industry set up a Washington-based agency called the Pharmaceutical Security Industry, run by Thomas Kubic, a former FBI deputy assistant director, to try to tackle the problem. And four years later, the WHO launched an international task force dedicated to the issue. But so far, such efforts have merely highlighted the growing trade. The Pharmaceutical Security Industry tracked more than 1,800 incidents of drug-counterfeiting around the world last year, 10 times the number when...
...industry experts who will make an international call for action against counterfeit drugs in Cotonou, Benin. The initiative is the brainchild of Jacques Chirac, the former French President, who wants to make the Cotonou declaration the first step of a worldwide campaign aimed at raising awareness of the problem and persuading governments to impose tougher penalties and improve routine testing of medications. The larger goal is to establish an international convention on counterfeit drugs as early as next year. Marc Gentilini, a French medical professor and expert on tropical diseases who is advising Chirac, says the problem is urgent...
...business, underground. "Now we bring things like bird cages through the [smuggling] tunnels [on Gaza's border with Egypt]," he says, adding that they are no longer allowed to import the cages from Israel. "The price in Egypt is cheaper than it is in Israel. But the problem is that we have to pay $50 for each container to bring them through the tunnel. So we can't make any money...