Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20464

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Magazine

Day M
Secrecy destroys faith in drug safety
New Scientist 1996 Sep 284
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15120490.200-secrecy-destroys-faith-in-drug-safety.html

Abstract:

THE licensing of drugs in Britain is inconsistent and driven as much by personal prejudices among the medical authorities as by informed science, a new report claims.

The study, to be published by the Economic and Social Research Council later this year, is an analysis of the 1994 Halcion affair in which Upjohn, the manufacturer of the sleeping pill Halcion, successfully sued the BBC’s Panorama programme for claiming that it had deliberately concealed important safety data on the drug. Halcion has been banned in Britain on safety grounds since 1991.

The author of the study, John Abraham, a science policy expert at Sussex University, says that judgments about which drugs are safe to sell are “social rather than scientific”. He warns that public confidence in the experts who regulate drugs safety is virtually nonexistent.

Abraham found that the various government agencies which decided the fate of Halcion failed to …