Drug firm 'kept quiet about lethal side-effect'

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Times
By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor



A HEART drug believed to be responsible for at least 100 deaths ought to have been withdrawn from the market much sooner, US doctors say.

They say that Bayer, the German drug company, had ample evidence within 100 days of introducing cerivastatin (known as Baycol or Lipobay) in 1998 that it caused serious muscle-wasting problems when combined with another drug.

Within a year, data showed high risks of the same sideeffects when the drug was taken on its own. But this data was neither disseminated nor published, Dr Bruce Psaty and colleagues say in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama).

In August 2001 the drug was withdrawn and Bayer faced thousands of lawsuits from patients who said that they had been injured by it. Many cases have since been settled out of court, and analysts calculate that settling them all will cost Bayer as much as $4 billion (£2.2 billion).

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1370860,00.html