More Dangerous Drugs

[Guest guest]

The drug companies have no interest in medicine, only profit. They couldn't care less how many lives they ruin, or how many people they kill, just as long as they get away with it for long enough to make some seious money out of it. One way to stop this madness is to make directors personally responsible for the crimes their companies commit and to remove limited liabilty from shareholders so that they could stand to lose all their invested money in a company if it acts illegally or knowingly causes blatent serious harm and this money then used for compensation. Read on:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/health/policy/13avandia.html?_r=1

Diabetes Drug Maker Hid Test Data, Files Indicate

By GARDINER HARRIS

Published: July 12, 2010

In the fall of 1999, the drug giant Kline Beecham secretly began a study to find out if its diabetes medicine, Avandia, was safer for the heart than a competing pill, Actos, made by Takeda.

Avandia's success was crucial to Kline, whose labs were otherwise all but barren of new products. But the study's results, completed that same year, were disastrous. Not only was Avandia no better than Actos, but the study also provided clear signs that it was riskier to the heart.

But instead of publishing the results, the company spent the next 11 years trying to cover them up, according to documents recently obtained by The New York Times. The company did not post the results on its Web site or submit them to federal drug regulators, as is required in most cases by law.

But the latest documents demonstrate that the company had data hinting at Avandia's extensive heart problems almost as soon as the drug was introduced in 1999, and sought intensively to keep those risks from becoming public. In one document, the company sought to quantify the lost sales that would result if Avandia's cardiovascular safety risk "intensifies." The cost: $600 million from 2002 to 2004 alone, the document stated.

But after GlaxoKline was found in 2004 to have hidden data that showed that its antidepressant, Paxil, led children and teenagers to have more suicidal thoughts and behaviors, the company settled a lawsuit by agreeing to publicly post data from all of its trials. In 2007, Congress mandated such disclosures. But the postings are often little more than cryptic references, so the issue is far from resolved.

Kaivey