clinical trials

(ENGLISH) –  He conocido a un científico belga (Electro microscopista  y patólogo) el Dr. Étienne de Harven desde 1993, cuando se  presentó en una conferencia, con la gracia y el entusiasmo característico de el, juntó las manos  y dijo que había traducido mi artículo de 1992 SPIN Distracción Fatal al francés.  (more…)

 15 Apr (PROPUBLICA) –  On the morning of May 3, 2010, three agents of the Food and Drug Administration descended upon the Houston office of Cetero Research, a firm that conducted research for drug companies worldwide.  Lead agent Patrick Stone, now retired from (more…)

01 Mar (CIDRAP NEWS) – Experts are puzzled by a new study in which influenza vaccination seemed to provide little or no protection against flu in the 2010-11 season—and in which the only participants who seemed to benefit from the vaccine were those who hadn’t been vaccinated the season before. (more…)

9Jul (NATURALNEWS) – Those of us who have long been describing the pharmaceutical industry as a “criminal racket” over the last few years have been wholly vindicated by recent news. Drug and vaccine manufacturer Merck was caught red-handed by two of its own scientists faking vaccine efficacy data by spiking blood samples with (more…)

8 Jun – There is an orphanage in Washington Heights, one of the poorest neighborhoods on Manhattan, located just above Harlem. A Catholic orphanage. It took in the children of crack addicts who’d been abandoned at the hospital. The nuns nursed some of them back to health, but some of them died. Because that’s what being born addicted to crack does to you.  It kills you. (more…)

12 FEB – CBS News – Five years ago, Duke University announced that it had an advanced, experimental treatment that would match chemotherapy to a patient’s own genetic makeup – a declaration hailed as the holy grail of cancer care. (more…)

Nancy Turner Banks MD spent twenty-five years practicing general obstetrics and gynecology during which she was also the director of outpatient gynecology at The North General Hospital in Harlem, New York.  She served as an attending physician at North General, Nyack Hospital in Nyack, New York, Columbia Presbyterian Medical (more…)

Two years ago, a group of Boston researchers published a study describing how they had destroyed cancer tumors by targeting a protein called STK33.  Scientists at biotechnology firm Amgen Inc. quickly pounced on the idea and assigned two dozen researchers to try to repeat the experiment with a goal of turning the findings into a drug. (more…)

MINNEAPOLIS – Last month, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a scathing reassessment of a 12-year-old research study of Neurontin, a seizure drug made by Pfizer. The study, which had included more than 2,700 subjects and was carried out by Parke-Davis (now part of Pfizer), was notable for how poorly it was conducted. (more…)

Since 2004, the pharmaceutical industry has paid $9 billion to settle thousands of criminal and civil complaints related to the illegal marketing of drugs that kill or injure a million Americans EVERY YEAR from adverse drug reactions (ADRs).

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27 Dec | AHRP – The disturbing circumstances surrounding the enrollment and subsequent suicide of Dan Markingson (2004) after he was given an experimental antipsychotic drug, Seroquel, as a test subject in AstraZeneca’s CAFE trial – having been enrolled while (more…)

10 Dec – The world’s biggest pharmaceutical company hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis, according to a leaked US embassy cable. (more…)

30 Aug 2010 – An editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, by its editor Jeffrey M. Drazen, M.D., and Alastair J.J. Wood, M.D. calls attention to the fact that pharmaceutical companies have tampered with the independent function of the Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) and have planted promotional reports in The NEJM–and other (more…)

4 Aug | Al Jazeera – The US healthcare industry is the world’s biggest, with $300 billion per year spent on prescription drugs.  For many these drugs have brought undeniable benefits.  But recent months have seen health scandal after health scandal making headlines in the US. (more…)

4 Aug | Al Jazeera – The US healthcare industry is the world’s biggest, with $300 billion per year spent on prescription drugs.  For many, these drugs have brought undeniable benefits.  But recent months have seen health scandal after health scandal making headlines in the US. (more…)

22 June (TORONTO STAR) – From the creation of fake academic journals, to bogus stories submitted to real journals, to falsified results in some of academia’s most respected publications – the pharmaceutical industry has been rocked by allegations that the world’s biggest drug companies put public relations above public safety. (more…)

By the time Melody Petersen gets around to interviewing Iowa’s state nosologist near the end of “Our Daily Meds,” the facts that she cites don’t even sound that grim. The nosologist’s job is to catalog Iowa’s deceased according to cause of death. He processes about 27,000 death certificates a year. And by his reckoning there were only five deaths caused by adverse reactions to prescription drugs in 2002. That low figure is jarringly out of whack with Ms. Petersen’s investigative reporting (more…)