Stories about: World Health Organization

For well over two years now, every single bottle of OxyContin that's bound for either Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, or US-based H.D. Smith, a midsize drug wholesaler, has been slapped with a special label that's hailed as the solution to the world's counterfeit drug problem

As an undercover agent with the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the Food and Drug Administration, Aaron Graham saw firsthand how counterfeit drugs can slip into the pharmaceutical supply chain. Graham, now VP and chief security officer for Purdue Pharma, once posed as the manager of an "institutional pharmacy" selling drugs at a discount to secondary wholesalers who were then supposed to sell them to nursing homes. Soon after he began, his phone started ringing. Dozens of smaller pharmaceutical wholesale companies were calling, desperate to buy his drugs. These secondary or "grey market" wholesalers scour the country and the world for low-price drugs they can sell back to major wholesalers for a profit. In addition to trawling for institutional pharmacies, some secondary wholesalers have been known to purchase counterfeit drugs from criminal organizations in places such as China, Thailand or Colombia.

The First World War claimed around 14 million people from many nationalities by the time it was over. Yet nearly twice as many people died in the Spanish Influenza epidemic that followed the war.

Yvonne Parle started working in the technology industry in the 1970s where she was the only female in a data centre in London. Since then, she has played various roles in the banking, insurance, petrochemical, health, resources and education sectors.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is one of the first government agencies in the country to get serious about metadata.