Such information is valuable to shopkeepers and producers and cannot be provided by a barcode

Posted by admin · · Jump to comments

Such information is valuable to shopkeepers and producers, and cannot be provided by a barcode.Ideally, the retailer wants the RFID tag to be built in to the product, so it can be tracked before it reaches the store as well as when it is on the rails. GlaxoSmithKline will be accused this week of backing drug trials in the US in which underprivileged children were forced to test Aids treatments against their will. No tests can take place on children without parental consent and drug companies have had great difficulty in the past obtaining such consent for Aids drug trials.However, the ACS is deemed to be the legal guardian for many HIV-positive children. According to a BBC2 documentary, Guinea Pig Kids, to be shown on Tuesday, the ACS has forced children to be involved in these trials, removing them from foster homes if the foster parent did not comply and even physically making the children take the drugs.The programme interviewed the family of Garfield Momodu, an HIV-positive child who was removed from his grandmother and taken into care when she stopped giving him the drugs prescribed in the trials.

Researchers also interviewed an unnamed child who said he and others were physically forced to take drugs through a peg-tube inserted into their stomachs.GSK admits that it supplied drugs for four trials conducted in New York by the PACTG and also supplied drugs and funds for another trial run by Columbia University Medical Center. But an RFID tag will identify the individual pullover or tin. Links to manufacturing and distribution databases can then help the store pinpoint where it was made, and how it has travelled through the supply chain.But what worries consumers is the idea that the retailer can track the goods after they have been purchased. Each tag contains a small microchip, with its own unique number.

A barcode allows a retailer to identify a product, whether it is a grey pullover or a tin of beans. Smart labels that can identify themselves over the airwaves, RFID tags have been described as the electronics industry's GM crops. A technology that scientists believe is both useful and harmless has become a focus of angry protests. While environmental groups have torn up fields of genetically modified plants, consumer groups have picketed stores using RFID to track their goods because of the perceived invasion of privacy. In one protest, more than 10,000 people demonstrated outside a store owned by Metro, a German retail group. Objections by consumer and civil rights groups also forced Benetton, the Italian clothing maker and retailer, to stall an RFID project.For retailers, radio frequency identity tags offer a number of advantages. Had it called for the demerger of BT Retail, the group would have had the chance of freeing up the managers in that business to do what they do best, as it did when it hived off mmO2.