andmon2

The Sigma price was purely to give an indication and show that its a relatively cheap and common chemical not something esoteric.

IMO, whether its $950 or $27k in the US, that is still outrageously high, considering that in the UK the same drug used to be sold to the NHS for under £8 a dose.

In fact, as its out of patent, I'm surprised people don't just point to the price in other countries right away before making excuses for the manufacturer.

A pharmaceutical that is being produced in such low volumes, irrespective of how mundane and cheap the raw chemical may be, cannot be produced cheaply.

According to their website (http://www.valeant.com/Portals/25/Pdf/PI/CDV-PI.pdf) CDV is Calcium Disodium Versenate (edetate calcium disodium).

Each dose appears to be 1g.

It looks like Sigma (the people who supply molecular biology labs with really pure chemicals for experiments) sell 1kg for less than $500. http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/sigma/ed2sc?lang...

Thats a huge markup potential, especially considering that Wikipedia says the FDA approved it in 1953, so it's long out of patent ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylenediaminetetraacetic_aci...).

And, in the UK, the National Health Service used to pay under £8 a dose according to an old copy of the British National Formulary (which is a publication which lists medicines , their uses and prices in the UK).

It is bad from a client data perspective as well.

If the freelancer has more than one client and they are "multi-tasking" by working on multiple projects and have apps like email, chat screens , web pages open etc and forget to shut them dowm before the automatic screenshot is taken, information will "leak" between one client and another.