Many informed observers see the pharmaceutical industry as the natural successor to the tobacco industry: enormously wealthy and politically connected, ruthless, and much more concerned about profit than about the health of its customers.
Here are several books describing the questionable practices that are an integral part of these powerful corporations' business model.
Ben Goldacre summarises the entire thesis of his book in the following twelve sentences. The rest of his 430-page book sets out in meticulous detail the factual evidence for these statements.
"Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer.
Canadian researchers are warning of an alarming and "exponential" rise in prescribing antipsychotic drugs to children.
Prescriptions for some of the most powerful psychiatric drugs on the market - so-called "second-generation" antipsychotics, or SGAs - to youth 18 and under increased 18-fold in British Columbia alone between 1996 and 2011, a new study finds, with some of the highest increases in prescriptions to boys as young as six. Children are being put on the potent drugs for a wide range of diagnoses not approved by Health Canada, the researchers say.
Health Canada is receiving growing numbers of reports of serious complications and even deaths in children taking powerful antipsychotics once reserved to treat schizophrenia and mania in adults.
The drugs are increasingly being prescribed to children as young as preschoolers. Postmedia News has learned that as of Dec. 31, Health Canada had received 17 fatal reports in children related to "second-generation antipsychotics," or SGAs.
Canadian generic drug maker Apotex Inc.'s exports to the United States could be blocked if the company doesn't correct quality control problems, according to a warning letter from a U.S. regulator.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's website includes a warning letter sent to Apotex describing "repeated deficiencies" in quality control, such as ensuring drug products at one of its Toronto-area plant were free of bacterial or fungal contamination.
The United States uses nearly 30 million pounds of antibiotics annually in food production. Livestock antibiotic use accounts for 80 percent of the total antibiotics sold in the US, and unnecessary use of antibiotics in food animals (cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys) is a major driving force behind the rampant development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Compare this to the 6 million pounds of antibiotics that are used for every man woman and child in the US combined. But unlike human use, in which antibiotics are prescribed to treat serious infection, in animals, drugs such as penicillins and tetracyclines are routinely added to animal feed as a cheap way to make the animals grow faster.
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If you had the opportunity to save “hundreds of thousands, maybe millions” of AIDS sufferers in Africa and other poor countries, what would you do? A complete no-brainer, right? Why in the world is it even a question?
The sad answer is that our federal government has this exact opportunity next week, when private member’s bill C-398 to enable this very outcome is voted on in the House. But the government has rejected such a bill before and intends to reject it again. Don’t ask me why. There’s no rational explanation, either of politics or public policy.
Since the death of his daughter as a result of taking a prescription drug, Conservative MP Terence Young has been campaigning for better regulation of the pharmaceutical industry.
Young testified on October 17 to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology as an expert witness regarding post-approval drug monitoring and the corrupt practices of pharmaceutical companies.
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On Oct. 17, 2012, Terence Young’s tireless 12-year crusade took him before a Senate committee looking into the safety and regulation of prescription drugs in Canada. The Conservative MP for Oakville, Ont., gave the panel an earful.
“Doctors and patients have no way to know when a drug is safe and when it is not,” he argued, noting that his own government’s drug monitoring system is “primarily in the hands of the big pharma companies themselves, even as a growing number of injuries and deaths are reported related to their use.”
Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc. will pay $95 million to settle allegations that the company promoted three drugs for uses that were not medically accepted, the government announced Thursday.
The Justice Department said the three are the stroke-prevention drug Aggrenox, the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease drug Combivent and the high-blood-pressure drug Micardis.
