The Paper Published by Dr. I. Brondz: Analytical Methods in Quality Control of Scientific Publications Part IV: Fraud Ordered by the Pharmaceutical Industry ()
The author of the paper, Ilia Brondz, is a renowned specialist in the Analytical Mass-Spectrometry and Chromatography and in practical utilizations of these powerful analytical methods in medicine and pharmacology, especially in the quality control of the antimalarial drug primaquine [1] . He also fights for purification of scientific journals from plagiarism and fraud publications, against falsification in science, art, music, literature and all kind of human activities.
The manuscript under consideration is the fourth in the series: Analytical Methods in Quality Control of Scientific Publications [2] -[5] . A strict quality control of scientific publications is extremely important for papers touching on the problems of public health. As the author shows in his manuscript, in this field an inevitable temptation exists to publish for a bribe false statements, approving low quality drugs with a low cost of production.
2. The Manuscript Defending Human Health
The manuscript is very educational and involves readers in a thrilling detective story around false publications related to the quality control of the primaquine tablets, widely used against malaria. Dr. Ilia Brondz presents convincing facts that the described in the publications of Elbashir, A. A. and co-workers method of quinocide determination as impurity in these tablets by capillary zone electrophoresis is not correct. The most striking fact is that after a negative decision from the Journal of Chromatography A the paper with this method appeared in the Biomedical Chromatography [6] with an astonishingly short time of its revision, only in one day!
Dr. Ilia Brondz has investigated in details the described method and has shown that the used in this method sample of quinocide monophosphate was never intended to be an analytical standard and cannot be used as a standard for quantitative determination of harmful impurities. So, the suggested quality control method of the primaquine tablets cannot determine precisely the quantity of quinocide that makes the tablets dangerous. But pharmaceutical industry may be interested in loosening the boundaries for control figures to make the production of tablets less expensive.
3. Conclusion
The manuscript of Dr. Ilia Brondz demonstrates once more the importance of the Analytical Mass-Spectro- metry and Chromatography in pharmaceutical applications and the necessity of a careful selection and working out of all details in used methods.