Daily Lawsuit News

Doctors Paid Off By Drug Companies At Harvard

Shocking evidence that those doctors that protect us are actually on-the-take has broken across the country, with the center of the investigation at the prestigious Harvard school where the Harvard Medical Journal is published.

Often, ivy-league schools such as Harvard run testing and medical trials on prescription drugs before they are released to the public or FDA for testing.  This has always been a sacred cow and thought to be above refute, until three psychiatrists went under investigation at Harvard for allegedly receiving much more money from drug firms and not reporting their income accurately.

The psychiatrists in question were working on testing anti-psychotic medications on children, and the honor system that researchers work off was brought into question.  If the Harvard Medical Journal is not a report that can be trusted, long seen as a standard of integrity, the question of what can be trusted is brought to light; no one is above being paid off by big pharmaceutical agencies.

Between the years 2000 and 2007, over 1.6 million dollars was received by two separate researchers at Harvard.  The third psychiatrist at Harvard received over a million.

The senate has written a bill that would force doctors to receive no more than $500 per year without reporting, accurately and with the threat of law, for handling drug testing from drug companies.  The shockwave created by this incident will be felt for years to come, and brings us to wonder what drugs have been given an OK by independent researchers only because they were receiving unusually large payments from the drug manufacturers.

Is nothing sacred anymore?  Certainly not the image of Harvard research.

“What makes this case particularly troublesome is that the Harvard group’s research has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic drugs to treat children, as was described in The Times on Sunday by Gardiner Harris and Benedict Carey. Although supporters praise the most prominent of the trio, Dr. Joseph Biederman, as a visionary who has saved many lives, critics complain that the Harvard studies have been too small and loosely designed to provide conclusive results. Critics say they also were subject to biased interpretation through use of a subjective rating scale.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/opinion/10tue2.html?ref=opinion

Source: New York Times

Posted in Medical Malpractice | No Comments »

Bayer Signals End Of Trasylol With Recall

Embroiled in controversy, Bayer Pharma has decided to remove the remaining stock in hospitals of its anti-bleeding medication Trasylol. The reasons, Bayer AG claims, is because of the response from studies that show it nearly doubled the death rate when compared to lower-cost alternative medications that were already established in the market.

Dual studies in Canada and America have cited that the drug, called also aprotinin, is more dangerous during heart surgeries than other medications. It is estimated that tens of thousands of lives could have been saved had the doctors or hospitals not chosen Trasylol.

Trasylol treatment costs over $1,250 USD compared to other medication alternatives that were $150 per dose, which calls into question whether Bayer was, in addition to producing a defective medication, gouging prices from those who were administered Trasylol.

The drug was known, or at least implicated, to have issues as far back as 2006, where Trasylol caused increased death rates, kidney failure or even stroke. Despite this, Bayer was granted FDA approval for Trasylol.

“These three drugs have been routinely used in heart surgery for more than a decade, but this is the first trial to rigorously compare them in a meaningful setting with meaningful clinical outcomes,” Fergusson said in a statement. “The results demonstrate the great value of and the need for independent academic clinical trials.”

Cardiac arrest and cardiogenic shock were common fatalities when people were given Trasylol for open heart surgery. Bayer claims it will continue to work with the FDA to figure out, “what impact, if any, the BART data and any other new data will have on the benefit-risk profile of Trasylol.”

One thing is certain, Trasylol lawsuits from the families of those affected by the drug’s side-effects will be filed soon, and a Trasylol class-action lawsuit can not be far off.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=bayer-pulls-trasylol-supp

Source: Scientific American

Posted in Prescription Drug Lawsuits, Trasylol | 22 Comments »