Thursday, January 8, 2009
Do drug companies have your best interest at heart?
This is an example of how pharmaceutical corporations put profit above lives. Bayer's history is a colorful one. They were originally a division of IG Farben, a company that in World War 2 collaborated with Nazi's to use Jewish slave labor in their factories and produced the Zyclon B gas used in the gas chambers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Farben#World_War_II
Bayer's anti-cholesterol drug, Baycol (also known as Lipobay and cerivastatin), has deadly side effects. The Food and Drug Administration received reports of 31 US deaths due to rhabdomyolysis, a potentially fatal adverse muscle reaction that results in muscle cell breakdown and release of the contents of muscle cells in the bloodstream. Symptoms include muscle pain, weakness, fever, nausea, and vomiting. Bayer admitted that the drug might have killed 52 people already worldwide, with another 1,100 potentially crippled. Although Bayer voluntarily recalled the drug after a large number of deaths, Germany's health minister, on 25 August 2001, accused Bayer of sitting on research documenting Baycol's lethal side-effects for nearly two months before the government in Berlin was informed.' A number of individual and class action law suits have been filed, including one in Pennsylvania which cited 480 cases of Baycol-related illnesses. The number of Baycol related deaths has risen to almost 100
In October 2001, Bayer was taken to court after 24 children in the remote Andean village of Tauccamarca were killed and 18 severely poisoned when they drank a powdered milk substitute that had been contaminated with methyl parathion. The white powder that resembles powdered milk and has no strong chemical odor was packaged in small plastic bags that provide no protection to users and give no indication of the danger of the product within. The bags were labelled in Spanish only, and carried drawings of healthy carrots and potatoes but no pictograms indicating danger or toxicity.
Think about this the next time you take an aspirin.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
This is unbelievable and yet it is still happening today. Africa too has become the dumping ground for these pharmecutical companies to not only dump drugs not approved by the FDA but also for "test drills" on drugs they wish to be approved by the FDA in the future and the United States Government, in its conflicted interest; Senators, Governors, Congressmen and Congresswomen alike; most, if not all elected in portion by drug company monies....DO NOTHING!!!
And like you point out here...the history of it then places these American companies and this American style of governance as equal to any of the mass murderers of our milennia, with freedom and free markets on their tongues!
Dispicable!
Post a Comment