The diabetes drug Avandia, which generated US$1.2 billion for GlaxoSmithKline last year, has been banned in Europe and restricted in the US.
It is yet another blow for Big Pharma. AFP reports that in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has severely restricted the drug after data suggested “an elevated risk of cardiovascular events, such as heart attack and stroke, in patients treated”.
Concern has been mounting over the drug’s active substance rosiglitazone. Sales of Glaxo’s other diabetes drugs Avandamet and Avaglim, which contain the substance, have also been halted in Europe.
In Malaysia, concern had already been expressed about rosiglitazone in a Malaysian Adverse Drug Reactions newsletter published in September 2007 by the National Pharmaceutical Bureau of the Malaysian Health Ministry. The newsletter reported that the New England Journal of Medicine had raised concerns about a statistically significant risk of myocardial infarction (heart attack) among users. But the Health Ministry then advised patients who have underlying heart disease not to stop taking their medication until they had consulted their doctors.
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Most of the world’s major drugs were discovered in the last century but then the benefits are yet to reach a majority of the world’s population. But Big Pharma cannot wait any longer for waiting may mean a screeching halt to its large money wheels…it needs to keep spinning. And so it spins with even more and more drugs that keep getting pushed by its rather large marketing arms to the unsuspecting public, some really dungu doctors and worse still even more greedier and dumb health officials. No one really knows what they are doing anymore except perhaps a few… Read more »
Not only spinning with more drugs, Big Pharma in collaboration with certain political bodies creates selective viruses on endemic scales (so to say create a problem first) to later produce drugs as solutions to counter these viruses (and so to say provide the solution later). The unsuspecting public becomes the victims of profiteering greed and mass murder by Big Pharma.
Have you heard of global selective population control?
http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/populationcontrolagenda2.htm
Eh Jonathan, when was Amaryl ever pulled back ah? It’s about as safe as any 3rd generation SU, with very few side effects. I noticed you actually quoted 3 drugs representing 3 companies here, GSK, Sanofi, MSD. Maybe you meant to quote the now withdrawn anti-obesity drug Acomplia (rimonabant) from Sanofi? Acomplia was the first in a new class of therapeutic agents called Cannabinoid-1 Receptor Blockers (CB1). It acts by selectively blocking CB1 receptors found in the brain and in peripheral organs important in glucose and lipid (or fat) metabolism, including adipose tissue, the liver, gastrointestinal tract and muscle. Somehow… Read more »