“It shakes you to your core.”
Hugo*, a cancer patient in Peru

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On 22 May 2024, a freight plane made its descent through mottled grey clouds above the Peruvian capital of Lima. The cargo it was bringing into the country could hardly have been more precious: thousands of glass vials filled with a life-saving cancer drug.

After touching down and clearing customs, the medicines were dispatched to 16 hospitals around the country. At least 5,000 of the vials were sent to Peru’s leading cancer care centre.

But days after the medicine arrived, staff at the hospital were told not to administer a single dose. Instead, every vial was to be incinerated. The drugs were unsafe – and every hospital was told to urgently take them off the shelves.

In one hospital, the news came too late. Patients had already been given the bad drugs.

Our latest investigation into substandard cancer drugs has found that since 2019, at least 118,000 vials of chemotherapy drugs have been binned in Peru after failing quality tests. Some batches were contaminated with glass or bacteria, while others contained so little of the key ingredient that they were probably entirely useless anyway.

This is a story about one country, but we’ve tracked chemotherapy drugs that failed quality tests to more than 100 nations around the world.

Our reporter Paul Eccles has been on the story for more than a year. It’s been slow, painstaking work. Paul has worked with academics in the US, who tested various drugs. He dug up trade records, which would show where all the medicines were shipped. He investigated the drugs companies and profiled one of them – after all, it’s the drugs companies which are profiting from this trade. And he’s spoken to doctors, experts and families affected by this scandal.

The investigation is also being published in Spanish – in Peru by Salud con Lupa, whose reporters worked with Paul, and in Spain by El País, the country’s biggest paper. Making our work accessible to the public and lawmakers in Peru hopefully means it’ll have a much bigger impact there, and the government will come under pressure for buying dodgy drugs.

Big Pharma can bite back when findings like this come out. I’ve already had a couple of complaints about our previous stories on dodgy chemotherapy drugs. But we’re ready for them, because we’ve put in the work – this latest investigation, like all the others, has been meticulously fact checked by us and reviewed by our lawyers.

That kind of detailed work is only possible because of our supporters. In this case, a particular mention goes to the Pulitzer Center, which funded some of it. But equally important are the readers who make this work happen by joining our TBIJ community.

Our community of members helps us stay independent, and means we can go after the stories that other publications can’t – we don’t answer to shareholder interests, we answer to you. If you believe in the power of independent and trustworthy news, then please join our community today:

Another way you can join the Bureau community is by working with us. This week I was on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme to talk about how citizens can participate in journalism. I talked about our Deliveroo investigation in 2021, when we worked with riders to discover that some of them were being paid as little as £2 an hour. We published just before Deliveroo listed on the London stock exchange, and its share price dropped 14% – not the kind of launch its execs would’ve hoped for.

TBIJ will always be better off for all the input we get from readers. We’re now investigating something else we need your help with.

We want to know whether political parties are planning to stick to their net zero targets as we approach local council elections in May. You’ll be getting pamphlets from the parties through your letterbox. Could you take a quick photo and email it to us? Just reply to this email with the photo. Thank you!

Last year we broke the story of a Sri Lankan influencer who claimed to make $300,000 on Facebook and taught others to do the same – including by posting racist AI-generated content. We found a whopping 128 Facebook pages linked to Geeth Sooriyapura and his students. When we interviewed him, he said he targets “old people… because they are the ones who don’t like immigrants”. It was our most widely shared story of 2025.

Misinformation online is rife and new generative AI tools are making it easier to create and spread falsehoods, doing more harm than ever before. We’ve also reported on Character.AI, a platform where young users can form intense emotional attachments to AI chatbots in spaces that sit largely outside existing online safety rules.

Join us on Wednesday 25 February at 6pm on Zoom to hear from TBIJ’s Big Tech editor James Clayton and our reporters Niamh McIntyre and Effie Webb about the risks posed by AI.

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

The son of the president of Equatorial Guinea used shell companies on the British Virgin Islands to acquire private jets.

Teodorin Obiang was convicted for embezzlement, money laundering and corruption in France in 2017. He is one of many who have used British overseas territories for their own financial gain.

Read more here. 

While discussing the Epstein files in our weekly editorial meeting, my colleague Eleanor Rose pointed out that the recent media coverage was so focussed on the men and the political fallout that the victims of the horrific sexual abuse had been sidelined.

So we asked Eleanor to write about it, which she did right then and there. Her piece is brutally honest and entirely necessary.

Eleanor writes:

At a moment when the misogyny of power is so visible, can we at least strip it from our politics?

Harriet Harman, one of the most senior figures in the Labour party, has urged Starmer to revive the role of first secretary of state, a post occupied by Peter Mandelson under Gordon Brown. She told the Guardian that the role must be held by a woman to “transform the political culture in government around women and girls”. That would be a good start.