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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19013

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

Chazan D
France pledges reform after diabetes drug scandal
BBC News 2011 Jan 15
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12200506


Full text:

French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand has promised a complete revamp of the country’s medical regulatory system.

He was speaking after an official report said a diabetes drug which caused up to 2,000 deaths should have been banned 10 years earlier.

The drug – known as Mediator – should have been banned as early as 1999, when it began to emerge that it could cause heart disease, the report said.

Several other European countries and the US then withdrew it.

‘Political connections’
But Mediator remained on sale in France for another 10 years.

Between 500 and 2,000 people in France are believed to have died because of its side effects.

It was developed to treat diabetics but millions of people took it simply to lose weight.

The report by a government agency, the Social Affairs Inspectorate, said it was incomprehensible that the authorities had failed to act sooner.

Mr Bertrand said it was now his duty to rebuild the regulatory system to protect the public.

His statement is being seen as an admission that one of the biggest medical scandals in France in recent years may not be an isolated case.

The affair has become politicised as the pharmaceutical company which manufactured the drug, Servier, reportedly had high-level political connections.

The health minister himself has been implicated by French media reports alleging that two of his advisors had previously worked for the company.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909