Drug Company Illegally Experimented on Wounded Soldiers in Iraq, Lawsuit Says

[Hissyspit]

http://www.bnet.com/blog/drug-business/drug-company-illegally-experimented-on-wounded-soldiers-in-iraq-suit-says/8927

Drug Company Illegally Experimented on Wounded Soldiers in Iraq, Suit Says
By Jim Edwards | July 5, 2011

Placebo Effect
Jim Edwards

When Denmark-based Novo Nordisk (NVO) settled a whistleblower case that alleged unlawful promotion of its anti-clotting drug NovoSeven in June, CEO Lars Rebien Soerensen said he was paying the $25 million to avoid the distraction of a lengthy legal battle.

That battle would have been distracting indeed: The plaintiffs — a former Novo medical science liaison executive and the U.S. army doctor to whom he allegedly offered kickbacks — claim Novo illegally funded medical experiments on injured soldiers in Iraq in a bid to widen the use of NovoSeven. The research eventually indicated that NovoSeven was not more useful than older alternatives for controlling bleeding in injured patients, and it carried the risk of excessive clotting in wounded patients. Yet Novo’s unapproved, “off-label” promotion eventually made NovoSeven the standard treatment for wounded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the suit.

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Some of the research was done on injured soldiers in Iraq, according to the suit:
Experimenting on soldiers injured in battle is illegal. Only the president can sign a waiver allowing research drugs to be used on the military during wartime, the suit claims:

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So widespread was the use of NovoSeven in the military that it was taken up by civilian hospitals in the U.S. A survey found that 75 percent of trauma centers in the U.S. now use it for surgical patients, according to the complaint. Yet Dr. Jeremy Perkins, an Army researcher who allegedly received money from Novo, wrote in a September 2007 PowerPoint slideshow that the “bottom line” was that NovoSeven is “an unproven tool currently used on blind faith.”

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[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[saras]

2. Nothing new here

The pharma industry has a long history of this. If it's more profitable, it replaces the old drug, whether it works better, about the same, or worse.