Evelyn Pringle is an investigative journalist who digs deeper. If you care about healthcare you cannot miss out on her insightful comments. Here's the most recent one.
Regulators and researchers corrupted by Big Pharma
By Evelyn Pringle
Jun 28, 2006, 00:44
Over the past six years, 10 Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved drugs have been withdrawn from the market due to deaths and injuries, leading lawmakers to accuse the FDA of not doing its job in protecting the public from unsafe drugs and to call for measures of improvement.
Read full story here.
6 comments:
The problem is fundemantal... The FDA exists to "approve" drugs, not to "test" drugs. The testing itself is done by "researchers", who are usually not doing their work as they're supposed to...
Why? Because they need to give positive results for these drugs in order to recieve grants and fundings they need. In short, the reports they issued were literally "bought" by the Big-Pharma's.
I really don't see the reason why there shouldn't be a complete revamp of the way we're approving drugs, because the current system isn't working. Unlike the social security this administration is so obsessive with "revamping", this is a lot more urgent, since people are literally "dying" out there.
CounterPunch (which is always an excellent place to read), ran this article on June 26th.
The sad things is, msmelody, if the gubment would ban trans fat, the steady stream of diabetics would dry up, as would the profits in this sector.
You have to love a 'food' substance that was discovered by Dupont. Even cockroaches won't eat it, and yet it's in just about all our fast foods, frozen foods and pastries.
Denmark and others HAVE banned it, but the food industry has stuffed too much cash in our leader's pockets for it to happen here.
Funny, but it ALWAYS boils down to money, right Ms Huffy?
msmelody
"Even a terrorist nuclear attack on a major U.S. city would not equal the number of Americans who have already been killed by the negligent actions of the FDA."
I made a similar arguement in the local paper last week. We are so obsessed with a few thousand dying at the hands of terra-ists, while our own coporations kill 100's of thousands of US citizens every year from food, drugs and various other products. All preventable.
Instead we spend hundreds of billions on a stupid ass war over oil. We could have bought Iraq for what we've spent so far.
I did some contract work for Searle on Celebrex, prerelease. I was assured that it was a completely harmless material. We were blowing this crap all over the lab. I was only involved for a few days; I pity the fools who worked with that stuff for years.
One thing about low-level FDA. They wanted consistant, traceable data, precision if you will, they could care less about accuracy. That was hard for me to comprehend.
The FDA is plenty funded. Part of that funding comes from the drug companies. The it is the only such organisation in the world funded by the very people it is supposed to be regulating, as far as I know.
Conflict of interest? You betcha.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/062906J.shtml
More support for the drug industry.
So, we covered drugs and rock 'n roll today, but it feels like something is missing?
Post a Comment