Highlights:
- Future Threat: AI generated Deep Fakes have the potential to disrupt patient care.
- Pharma Bribery is a global phenomenon, endangering people’s health.
- Himalayan medical fraud: $20 million fake insurance payouts through criminal network.
- Poor health among school children, impact of school closures during the pandemic?
Website: https://uho.org.in
Download: https://uho.org.in/nl/2026-04-03-newsletter.pdf (copy and paste the link)
By Dr. Amitav Banerjee, Chairperson of the Universal Health Organisation (UHO)
Future Threat: AI generated Deep Fakes have the potential to disrupt patient care. Fast rollout of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for diagnostics in hospitals as in some states like Andhra Pradesh, should be tempered with caution. Deep fakes which were the bane of celebrities as a result of fake images generated by AI to the extent that some moved the courts to protect their identity, have the potential to create chaos in hospitals.
According to a media report, fake X-Ray images generated by AI to resemble true results from human patients, can not only fool experienced radiologists but also the AI tools. Only 41% of the radiologist could identify the images as fake.
This should put all hospitals adopting AI for diagnostics on guard as deep fake X-ray images and histopathology reports can lead to scams of various sorts such as fraudulent litigations or sabotage by hackers endangering patients.
We strongly recommend that hospital administrators should put in place potential digital safeguards to distinguish real from fake images and prevent manipulation such as putting invisible watermarks.
UHO is concerned that all these measures for cybersecurity will increase the cost of running a hospital instead making medical care costlier.
Prematurely rolling out AI, with all these hazards may land us in deep waters instead of improving patient care.
Pharma Bribery is a global phenomenon, endangering people’s health. Few months ago we reported how a group of thirty Indian doctors enjoyed the hospitality of the medical industry during foreign jaunts. The UHO also reported in its newsletter that even after a year of the this misdemeanour no action has been taken by the National Medical Commission against these doctors making a mockery of existing rules and codes of conduct.
However, according to reports from different parts of the world, this is just the tip of the iceberg and the corruption runs deeper.
In Greece, Novartis Hellas paid for physicians to attend international medical congresses and warned it would withdraw support if prescription quotas for its drugs were not met.
The subsidiary admitted misconduct in 2020 and agreed to pay $225 million in criminal penalties under a deferred prosecution agreement, as parent company Novartis AG entered a series of settlements with U.S. enforcement agencies to resolve Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violations abroad. Previously, in 2016, Novartis paid $25 million to resolve SEC civil charges over bribery in China, without admitting or denying the findings, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Meanwhile, Pfizer subsidiaries in multiple countries, including Italy and Russia, were accused by the SEC in 2012 of paying bribes over about a decade to foreign officials to secure regulatory and formulary approvals, boost sales, and increase prescriptions, the SEC complaint shows. In China, one subsidiary allegedly created “points programs” that let doctors earn gifts based on prescribing its medications, according to the SEC, while in Croatia, another offered a “bonus program” that reportedly rewarded doctors with cash, international travel, or free products.
After voluntarily disclosing the misconduct in 2004 and cooperating with investigators, Pfizer and an indirect subsidiary agreed to pay more than $45 million in separate settlements, without admitting or denying the allegations, the SEC reported. In a parallel action, Pfizer H.C.P., an indirect, wholly- owned healthcare-focused subsidiary, agreed to pay a $15 million penalty to resolve its investigation of FCPA violations after admitting to improper payments to foreign government officials, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
And in Greece, Poland, and Romania, Johnson & Johnson subsidiaries, employees, and agents were accused by regulators of using slush funds, sham contracts, and off-shore companies in the Isle of Man to reward doctors and administrators who ordered or prescribed its products, including surgical implants. The 2011 SEC complaint also accused the company of paying kickbacks in Iraq to obtain business.
Johnson & Johnson voluntarily disclosed some of the violations and conducted an internal investigation. Without admitting or denying the allegations, the company agreed to pay more than $48 million to settle the case and $21.4 million to resolve parallel DOJ criminal charges, SEC records show.
Together, these pharmaceutical companies, their subsidiaries, and others have reportedly paid at least $12.6 million in bribes to win drug approvals, boost sales, and secure government contracts, a new analysis of international enforcement records shows. The cases resulted in more than $1.1 billion in sanctions, often without admissions or denials of wrongdoing. Yet many alleged schemes designed to prioritize profits over patients persisted for years before they were uncovered.
The concerns from UHO are that from a public health perspective, the impact of pharmaceutical industry bribery extends well beyond financial penalties and corporate reputations. Corruption, is harmful for patients, especially when companies seek to promote the sale of drugs with unproven or dangerous uses.
Among other harms, systemic bribery can distort prescribing patterns and reimbursement decisions, diverting resources toward higher-cost, lower quality or unnecessary drugs and treatments, which is damaging to patients both medically and economically.
Bribes can also compromise regulations designed to ensure drug safety and efficacy, jeopardize clinical decision-making, and undermine trust in medical institutions and practitioners. They say, erode public confidence in medical institutions and can harm patient outcomes “when decisions are driven by financial incentives rather than medical need.” In the worst case, corruption kills.
UHO recommends complete transparency of interactions between the medical profession and the industry. There should be means of public scrutiny of these interface, from raw trial data to financial transactions and everything about safety and sales policy. These should be in the public domain because the public is the consumer of these products. Doctors caught in such bribery should be severely punished and their licenses revoked.
Himalayan medical fraud: $20 million fake insurance payouts through criminal network.
A sprawling criminal network of trekking agencies, hospitals, and helicopter pilots allegedly fed tourists baking soda to induce illness, siphoning nearly $20 million in fraudulent insurance payouts.
A court in Nepal is investigating 32 persons on charges of scamming millions of dollars from tourists by organizing fake rescues during their trek to the Himalayas. Owners of prominent trekking agencies, helicopter companies and hospital owners are suspected to be involved in this scam.
All the accused are implicated in organized crime. Police investigation shows these agencies used to feed baking soda to tourists so that they could get sick. The profit made from the fake rescue was shared among stakeholders — the hospital, the trekking agency, helicopter companies and guides.
In January, CIB had arrested six executives from three prominent mountain rescue agencies for allegedly orchestrating fake helicopter rescues of foreign tourists. They were accused of siphoning off nearly $19.7 million through insurance fraud. Later, hospital operators, pilots, and trekking agency owners were also implicated in the course of the investigation.
We regret that while corruption was known to be widespread in Nepal, it has also affected the hospitals which are supposed to maintain a high degree of integrity while upholding the ethos of service to sufferers. This deliberate quackery will tarnish the image of the noble profession of medicine.
Poor health among school children, impact of school closures during the pandemic?
According to a countrywide survey among 1.4 lakhs school children from 333 schools in 112 cities, only 34% of the children had satisfactory physical health.
The findings brought out poor stamina (cardiovascular health) and weak muscle strength. The impact of school closures and lockdowns may have cut the “chain of physical activity” among the school children instead of breaking the “chain of transmission” of the corona virus. As a consequence obesity was one of the reasons for the poor performance on physical activity among the children.
UHO recommends that in future pandemics, even in genuine ones instead of false alarms, the impact on overall health of the population, particularly of vulnerable groups like children, should be considered before contemplating unprecedented and draconian restrictive measures which were employed across the board in the last pandemic. Early in the pandemic, data indicated that children were at no risk from the virus and based on this evidence school should never have been closed. The experience of Sweden which kept schools open throughout the pandemic without any increase in morbidity and mortality among children or among their teachers supports this proposition.
The weekly newsletters bring the updates on the science, battered and bruised during the pandemic, legal updates and impact of activism for a just society, across the world. These are small steps to promote Transparency, Empowerment and Accountability – the ethos of the UHO.
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