Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Is Big Pharma Inventing Diseases?

The Public Library of Science and Medicine, a peer-reviewed open-access journal, this week has a series of 11 articles focusing on Disease Mongering.

The articles claim pharmaceutical companies are inventing diseases to increase sales figures while offering nothing about disease prevention.

Exerpt from one of the articles:

Disease mongering turns healthy people into patients, wastes precious resources, and causes iatrogenic harm. Like the marketing strategies that drive it, disease mongering poses a global challenge to those interested in public health, demanding in turn a global response. This theme issue of PLoS Medicine is explicitly designed to help provoke and inform that response.

posted by nattietodd @ 11:48 AM 0 Comments

Additional $9 million award in Vioxx case

From Associated Press:
A jury awarded $9 million in punitive damages on Tuesday to a man who blamed his heart attack on Vioxx, finding that manufacturer Merck & Co. failed to warn about the risks of its arthritis drug and misrepresented the risks to physicians.

The damages are in addition to $4.5 million already awarded to John McDarby, 77, of Park Ridge, who suffered a heart attack after four years on Vioxx, a painkiller taken by 20 million Americans before being pulled off the market.

In its only other loss in a Vioxx case, Merck was ordered last August to pay $253 million to the widow of a man who died after taking the drug for a short time. That amount will be reduced because the law in Texas, where the case was heard, limits punitive damages.

The drug company said it would appeal.


More Vioxx Information

posted by nattietodd @ 7:54 AM 0 Comments