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Vital chemotherapy drugs used around the world have failed quality tests, leaving cancer patients in more than 100 countries at risk of ineffective treatments and potentially fatal side effects, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) can reveal.

The drugs in question form the backbone of treatment plans for numerous common cancers including breast, ovarian and leukemia. Some drugs contained so little of their key ingredient that pharmacists said giving them to patients would be as good as doing nothing. Other drugs, containing too much active ingredient, put patients at risk of severe organ damage or even death. “Both scenarios are horrendous,” said one pharmacist. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Doctors from multiple countries told TBIJ of the drugs in question not working as expected, leaving patients suddenly unresponsive to treatment. Other patients suffered side effects so toxic that they could no longer tolerate the medicine.

The variance found in the levels of active ingredient was alarming. In some cases, pills from the same blister pack contained different amounts.

These findings expose huge holes in the global safety nets intended to stop manufacturers cutting corners to boost profits, and to protect patients from bad drugs. All the while, patients and governments with stretched resources are paying the price for drugs that don’t work.

Ukrainian scientists confirmed that after the Russian oil spill in the Kerch Strait, all Black Sea countries have found themselves in a risk zone. For some, these are oil spills, for others – birds in fuel oil or fish and water, polluted with toxins. But pollution affected all the coasts.

Several days later, oil clots and dead fish were found in almost all the Black Sea countries, but it turned out to be complicated to prove that these were the consequences of the spill of that very Russian oil. Yet, Ukrainian scientists developed a model to forecast the movement of oil in the sea and proved this fact. They also forecast that the swimming season will not pass without surprises – oil that went to the bottom in the cold season rises to the surface in summer.

• Amnesty visits more than 50 scamming compounds in 18-month long research
• Testimony from survivors details human trafficking, slavery and forced labour affecting thousands
• Findings point towards state complicity in abuses carried out by Chinese criminal gangs

The Cambodian government is deliberately ignoring a litany of human rights abuses including slavery, human trafficking, child labour and torture being carried out by criminal gangs on a vast scale in more than 50 scamming compounds located across the country, Amnesty International said in a new report published today.

Survivors interviewed for the report, “I Was Someone Else’s Property”, believed they were applying for genuine jobs but were instead trafficked to Cambodia, where they were held in prison-like compounds and forced to conduct online scams in a billion-dollar shadow economy defrauding people around the world.