Posted on 02/20/2015 8:04:00 AM PST by surroundedbyblue
With sales of bogus prescription drugs amounting to tens of billions of dollars worldwide, imperiling public health systems and pharmaceutical supply chains, counterfeit medications are an enormous threat — but the solution to that threat could be smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
And it could be designed here in Pittsburgh.
Oh, and you’d have to swallow it.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are working on a radio-frequency tagging system that could be embedded into pills and encrypted with codes that would guarantee the provenance and authenticity of the medication.
“Think of a grain of salt. A fraction of a millimeter,” said L. Richard Carley, one of three primary researchers on the project. “You could swallow that. It wouldn’t do anything to you.”
Radio ID tags are everywhere, in various sizes and forms — they have replaced the stamped due-date cards in the back of your library books, and they are fastened to leather coats to make sure you don’t steal them. They are implanted in pets, in case they get lost. Runners wear them on their shoes or ankles so they know their exact marathon time. And if you have an E-Z Pass transponder in your car, that, too, is a radio tag.
Radio-frequency identification, or RFID, technology is already used to track how prescription drugs move across international borders and through the medical supply chain. Mainly, it’s deployed on packages and pill bottles — but not on the pills themselves, which allows for the possibility that counterfeiters could get their hands on a properly tagged box or bottle, then fill it with fake meds.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
“The CMU proposal is not without precedent — two years ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved an ingestible radio ID tag. Designed by California’s Proteus Digital Health in partnership with Oracle Health Sciences, the sensors are meant to track whether a patient has actually taken the medicine, and they also may be able to communicate vitals information, such as heart rate, to the radio readers. Others have proposed using edible RFID tags in foods to track their calorie content. “
Read the article. Technology like this is certainly being used to track people, effectively spying on them. Can it have positive applications, like assisting in prosecuting those who traffic illegal drugs? Sure, but it also has the potential for very serious & dangerous abuses, the kind that conservatives should be vehemently opposed to.
“Technology like this is certainly being used to track people, effectively spying on them.”
Sorry, no, that is ludicrous. These things cannot transmit information at any significant distance.
If that’s true then how could it be used to catch criminal drug-runners?
Sorry I’m not buying what you’re selling
As I said, it could be used to scan the drugs after law enforcement catches someone, to find out what the original source was.
“Sorry I’m not buying what you’re selling”
That’s fine, you can continue in your ignorance if you like. Anyone can look up what RFID is and isn’t capable of for themselves and see whether I am lying or not.
Gd gave us intelligence and the materials to create. Technology is a wonderful thing. But it is not inherently good and evil. It can be used for both. Gd lets us choose but has great belief in our ability to learn to choose good over evil.
Though we failed greatly with our choice of governments leader(s)...
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