AlterNet: Drug Warning Labels Should Include FDA Ties to Big Pharma

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Drug Warning Labels Should Include FDA Ties to Big Pharma

By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet. Posted August 28, 2007.


Ninety-two percent of FDA advisory meetings in the last decade included a member with financial ties to drug companies. A look at how that affects the drugs that are allowed on the market -- even after they're shown to be deadly.


They're just dropping like Chinese imports -- prescription drugs that turn out to be deadly after FDA approval.

Not just Vioxx -- recently found to cause kidney problems on top of the heart attacks for which it was pulled -- but its seven deadly sisters named by the FDA's Dr. David Graham before Congress in 2004: Crestor, Meridia, Serevent, Lotronex, Arava, Accutane and Bextra.

After a post-Vioxx damage control campaign -- "FDA has confidence in the safety and efficacy of Crestor" read AstraZeneca ads which the FDA pulled -- it wasn't that confident. The cholesterol drug Crestor was found in the heart journal Circulation to be eight times more likely to cause rhabdomyolysis, kidney failure or spillage of protein in the urine than other cholesterol drugs.

Thirty users of Meridia, Abbott Laboratories' weight-loss drug, died of cardiovascular problems from 1997 to 2003 and 224 other experienced nonfatal strokes, heart attacks and other cardiovascular ailments according to FDA reports.

And Accutane manufacturer Hoffman-La Roche Inc. goes to trial this October in Madison County, Illinois -- where the first Vioxx trial occurred -- to defend charges that its acne drug caused Jason Peipert's inflammatory bowel disease, which ruined the young soccer star's career.

Then there's Sanofi-Aventis' notorious antibiotic Ketek -- blamed in the death of four and liver injury or failure of 37 since 2004 -- whose primary clinical trials doctor, Anne Kirkman Campbell, is in federal prison in Lexington, KY for forging data for money. (Test subjects included her entire staff and members of her family.) ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/60973/