July 12, 2002 Babies Exposed to Toxic Vaccines FYI Several recent articles focus on unsafe vaccines: ABC News reports (below) that 3,400 people, half of them children, “received the questionable vaccines from Park Nicollet Clinic in the Minneapolis metropolitan area. The vaccines included polio booster shots, hepatitis A and B…
The Crawford Resignation Mystery Sat, 24 Sep 2005 Merrill Goozner of Center for Science in the Public Interest provides insight into what may lie behind the sudden resignation of FDA Commissioner, Lester Crawford. Goozner surggests, “One possible clue to the administration’s thinking comes from the appointment of Andrew von Eschenbach,…
Calls Mounting for FDA Revamp / Americans Are the most medicated population in the world – DHHS Sun, 26 Dec 2004 A government survey by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, confirms that Americans are the most medicated population in the world – 44 percent of Americans had…
Jeffrey Drazen editor NEJM Turns Activist on Drug Trials Thu, 26 May 2005 Journal editors, one by one are trying to retrieve the integrity of their publications, at last recognizing that the pharamaceutical industry is a corrupting factor in medical research and the information disseminated about medicine. Jeffrey Drazen who…
Hormone Replacement “Bombshell” is Not and isolated incident Wednesday, July 10, 2002 Until a “bombshell” study overturned hormone replacement treatment (HRT), Premarin was the most prescribed drug in U.S. in the last decade (45 million Rx in 2001) and Prempro the most prescribed estrongen / progesterone combination (22 million Rx…
FDA Standards – Good Enough for Government Work? Fri, 23 Sep 2005 An essay in The New England Journal of Medicine, by Jerry Avorn, M.D., professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, chalolenges FDA’s “minimalist” drug…
NIH: Public Servant or Private Marketer? Wed, 22 Dec 2004 David Willman of the Los Angeles Times provides an important reminder that the FDA is not the only government healthcare agency to have betrayed the public trust and lost its credibility. While the FDA has lent its seal of approval…
How Genentech, Novartis Stifled A Promising Drug – WSJ Tue, 05 Apr 2005 A front page story in The Wall Street Journal should be distributed to every Congress person who will be considering Bioshield II providing yet additional financial incentives and give-a-ways to pharmaceutical companies. The story perfectly illustrates this…
Duke Survey Clinical trials: Research Conflicts of Interest Violate ethical Guidelines_UPI Sun, 27 Oct 2002 A major Duke University survey of 108 U.S. medical schools reveals that medical institutions fail utterly to meet international standards aimed at ensuring the integrity of clinical research and the safety of the subjects. Conflicts…
Federal Study Finds No Benefit of New Antipsychotic Drugs – WashPost/Wall StreetJ/NY Times Tue, 20 Sep 2005 The findings of a $44 million government sponsored study, CATIE, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, comparing an older generic antipsychotic to four new atypical antipsychotics, undercut the legitimacy of psychiatry’s…
FDA Smoke & Mirrors Musical Chairs Wed, 16 Feb 2005 Amidst widespread public criticism of the FDA’s role as facilitators in the marketing of lethal drugs that killed thousands of people, the Administration made several announcements incorporating terminology (such as: “we’re in an era of openness” “transparency”). But politically correct…
Conflicts of Interest Rampant in Medical Research – NEJM / News Tribune (Wash) Thu, 24 Oct 2002 A Duke University survey published in The New England Journal of Medicine today, confirms the claims made by critics: clinical research at academic institutions is not governed by ethical standards–clinical research is entirely…
