Drug firms hiding negative research are unfit to experiment on people

[HuckleB]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/14/drug-companies-bury-negative-research

"...

The pharmaceutical industry’s behaviour has collapsed into farce. Doctors and academics – who should feel optimism at working with the drug companies to develop new treatments – feel nausea instead, knowing that there are only informal systems to deal with buried data, and these have clearly failed.

In 2005 the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors put its foot down and said its journals would only publish trials that were fully registered before they started, which should make any that went missing much easier to spot. Several years later, as recorded in this column, fewer than half of all the trials that the editors published had been adequately registered, and more than a quarter were not registered at all.

After the New York attorney general sued GlaxoSmithKline over its “illegal and deceptive” reporting of the risks of its anti-depressant paroxetine (tradename Seroxat), GSK agreed to publish all trial data on a website. But, several years later, we saw last month that GSK and the Food and Drug Administration had sat on data showing that rosiglitazone (tradename Avandia) increased the risk of heart problems.

I can’t see why any company withholding data should be allowed to conduct further experiments on people. I can’t see why the state doesn’t impose crippling fines. I hope it’s because politicians don’t understand the scale of the harm."


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Reality check: Goldacre is not your average anti-Pharma shill. He knows that pharmaceuticals help many people, but he, like most health care professionals, sees the problems with the industry.

[flamin lib]

1. Drug trials should be conducted by neutral third parties that have

no interest in the outcomes and all data should be published for peer review.

If I can hire ahit in wesr Dallas for a couple hundred dollars what would a big drug company do for hundreds of billions? It's a question my Doctor and I discuss every time he tries to prescribe statins.