Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6015

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: news

TV Guide : Episode 102 : A Bitter Pill
PBS TV 2006 Sep 8
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/air/episodes_102.html

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:

See also “ Big Pharma’s shameful Secret” at – http://www.bloomberg.com/specialreport/bigpharma.html

Full text:

Episode Guide-
Episode 102
A Bitter Pill

Every prescription medicine you take is tested on humans before the Food and Drug Administration approves it for sale and use. But if you assumed those tests are always done smartly, safely and ethically under the watchful eye of expert regulators, you would be very, very wrong.

Perhaps even dead wrong.

That’s what a team of investigative reporters from BLOOMBERG MARKETS magazine discovered in a yearlong investigation culminating in a devastating, award-winning report called “Big Pharma’s Shameful Secret.” The magazine shared with readers the closely-held secret that “across the U.S., the centers that do the testing — and the regulators who watch them — allow scores of people to be injured or killed.”

Approximately 3.7 million people in the U.S. have enrolled in drug tests sponsored by the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Each test requires stringent scientific and ethical standards. But, as the BLOOMBERG investigation reveals, the nation’s biggest drug companies now farm out much of their experimental drug-trial work to for-profit centers whose practices are monitored by other for-profit companies, all of them paid by “Big Pharma.” This conflict of interest, as the magazine reports, has led to egregious incidents.

AIR vividly brings to life the magazine’s explosive findings through interviews with victims and their families, including a daughter whose father died as a result of improper monitoring during a clinical trial testing drugs for high blood pressure.

AIR includes an interview with an Argentine immigrant who says he was paid over $9,000 for participating in two clinical trials at the same time, one of which was with SFBC, at the time North America’s largest for-profit clinical trials company. He also provides a firsthand account of overcrowding at the SFBC testing facility, and discusses how easy it was to enroll in trials there in exchange for payment. When the BLOOMBERG report was published, SFBC threatened this man with deportation if he did not recant his statements to the magazine.

BLOOMBERG MARKETS’ investigation into the seamy underside of clinical drug trials won a coveted Investigative Reporters and Editors Certificate and a George Polk Award for Health Reporting. It led to a Congressional investigation into human testing and to the resignation of some top executives at SFBC. A month after the story was published, SFBC’s stock price had dropped by 60 percent. Another month after that, both the President and the CEO of SFBC resigned.