Word: fakeness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Discretion and innovation in the world of toilets are probably not a surprise to anyone who has ever used a bathroom in Japan, where Toto - the Japanese company that manufactures johns that can do everything but your taxes - is omnipresent and the "sound princess," a fake flushing noise to disguise that of urination, is installed in virtually every public restroom. Nevertheless, ANA has apparently decided to spare its non-Japanese-speaking customers the potential embarrassment of preboarding potty talk. Though the Japanese-language announcement video at the gate for domestic departures politely advises travelers to use the bathroom before boarding...
...problem is not limited to poor countries, however. When Pfizer recalled 120,000 packs of its cholesterol drug Lipitor in Britain in 2005 after it discovered a counterfeit version, it found that 60% of all the returned packs were fakes. Jacques Franquet, who heads security operations for the French drugmaker Sanofi Aventis, says his teams routinely find fake versions of about 15 of the company's drugs worldwide...
...enforcement agencies to help them take action. Pfizer has also started experimenting with safer packaging. For example, all its Viagra blockbuster packs in the U.S. now have a radio-frequency-identification tag. Merck, meanwhile, is funding the distribution of minilabs to developing countries to improve detection of fake ingredients in drugs used to combat malaria, HIV and tuberculosis...
...most other countries lag behind, Franquet says. Kubic says that political efforts to fight the problem have flagged in recent years, mainly because countries like India and Brazil fear that the large amounts of generic drugs they produce legally may be mistakenly targeted in a global crackdown on fake-drug-trafficking. (Read "Are Direct-to-Consumer Drug Ads Doomed...
...they avoid using the word counterfeit since this term is often associated with intellectual-property issues and could lead some to believe that the initiative is aimed at protecting pharmaceutical companies' profits, not safeguarding public health. Franquet says it's important for public opinion to be mobilized against fake medicines, and he believes that given the sometimes tragic consequences, this should be easy to accomplish. "This is one of the rare areas where the public is on our side," he says...