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Not really. When’s the last time you saw any pol manufacture or expend any political capital to advocate for faster cures.
By the way, on the Ketek matter. How many articles have mentioned that nearly ten million prescriptions have been written for Ketek worldwide since it was approved in Europe in 2001 and about 5 million have been written in the US since it was approved here in 2004. Over that time there have been 11 cases of acute liver failure, including the four deaths, in patients treated with Ketek, according to an FDA memo. FDA safety evaluators also uncovered 23 other cases where patients suffered serious liver injuries after receiving the antibiotic. Which means the incidence for liver problems (we can assume a part of those were the result of genetic mutations and poor prescribing, neither of which can be anticipated under our current regulatory system) is about .00066 percent and a death rate of 0.0000008
Meanwhile, “Acetaminophen poisoning has become the most common cause of acute liver failure in the United States,” report the authors of a new study in the December 2005 issue of Hepatology, the official journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD). While attempted suicides still account for many cases, almost half are the result of unintentional overdose.
Now about 100 million people use acetaminophen each year. And each year about there about 56,000 ER visits and 100 deaths (liver failure) attributed to the drug. That’s an injury rate of .000056 if my math is right and a death rate of 0.0000001. This drug has the same genetic problems with metabolism as Ketek.
Meanwhile the community acquired pneumonia for which Ketek was developed and is used for — since other antibiotics are failed to beat back resistant bacter — leads to 500,000 hospitalizations and 50,000 deaths a year.
Somehow Grassley and the media has misplaced these facts, along with the incontrovertible evidence that the drug works.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a combination of Hycamtin (topotecan hydrochloride) and cisplatin for use as the first drug treatment for women with late-stage cancer of the cervix when a physician determines that surgery or radiation therapy are unlikely to be effective. The approval includes a new indication for Hycamtin, which was approved in 1996 for treating ovarian cancer and in 1998 for small cell lung cancer.
In the United States there are an estimated 10,000 new cases of cervical cancer and about 3,700 related deaths each year.
“We are making great strides in the fight against cervical cancer, a disease that, world wide, is the second most common cancer in women,” said Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, Acting FDA Commissioner. “This course of drug therapy is a potentially life-prolonging option for thousands of women.”
No doubt a Congressional hearing will be called to investigate.
Has Charles Grassley finally jumped the shark in his attempt to generate media attention with his fearmongering over drug safety? His marching over to the HHS to demand a meeting with the official who is “covering up” the coverup of the coverup of Ketek fizzled when the sober-minded folks there simply told him to get lost.
Here is the breathless account from the Washington Post:
“After months of trying to get firsthand information from a government official familiar with a controversial new antibiotic, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, marched into the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters Wednesday asserting his congressional right to receive the data.
After a brief meeting with senior HHS and Food and Drug Administration officials, Grassley departed empty-handed and angry.
“This is extraordinary for me,” the senior Republican said outside the headquarters. “I haven’t had to go to an agency like this since 1983 to get information I requested.”
“I smell a coverup,” he said.
Even Post reporters have to put some fact outs…..turns out Grassley does have his hands full….
“FDA officials denied any impropriety, saying they were cooperating with Grassleyé¾ staff and had sent 400 boxes of documents related to the approval and safety of the drug, Ketek. Some information had to be withheld, the agency said, because of continuing investigations.”
So much for Grassley’s effort to turn the Ketek incident, which in no way affected the safety or the importance of the drug, into the DaVinci Code.
What’s more the FDA is planning to go head and submit the data to an FDA advisory committee for an application to use Ketek for another infection…. I think Grassley’s act is wearing thin and prancing over to HHS to exercise his congressional right (does that include the right to yank FDA staffers away from their job and have them work in your office to dig up dirt on the agency they are supposed to work for, Senator?) only to be told to keep his pants on is pretty damn funny. Hey Chuck, any limos driven by guys wearing black following you as well?
We need more of this resolve on the part of the FDA and companies. That’s how you treat blowhards and bullies who think they are Jack Bauer but instead wind up looking like Inspector Clousseau.
One of the most difficult meetings I ever held at the FDA was with a group of parents (mostly moms) of teenagers who had committed suicide while taking SSRI antidepressants. In the wake of a very emotional advisory committee meeting, heavily covered by the media, these well-meaning and understandably devastated parents believed that these medicines were the cause of their horrible losses. I listened. Afterwards I wept. A parent of two children, I cannot even begin to understand their agony.
But as much as they needed to believe that the medications were at fault, the science was never clear. Anecdotal events, even terrible ones, are not science. Now a major new study, the first of its kind, finds that rather than boosting suicide rates, SSRIs have actually saved thousands of lives by preventing suicides since they were introduced in 1988.
And before you ask, no, the study was not funded by a pharmaceutical company. The funding came from the NIH and the Dana Foundation. The full study appears in the June issue of the journal PLos Medicine.
For this study, the authors analyzed federal data on suicide rates since 1960, along with sales of fluoxetine (Prozac) since it became available in 1988. Analysis was continued through 2002. Prozac was used as a benchmark for the broader class of drugs.
Between the early 1960s and 1988, suicide rates held relatively steady, fluctuating between 12.2 per 100,000 and 13.7 per 100,000.
Since 1988, however, suicide rates have been on a gradual decline, with the lowest point being 10.4 per 100,000 in 2000. During the same time frame, Prozac prescriptions rose, from 2,469,000 in 1988 to 33,320,000 in 2002.
Using mathematical modeling, the investigators estimated the rates of suicide if the pre-1988 trends had continued, estimating that there would have been an additional 33,600 suicides if the pre-1988 trends had been maintained.
With that in mind, moves to restrict the use of SSRI antidepressantscould have a harmful effect, the authors stated.
“I don’t think these claims that antidepressants increase suicide have a solid base,” said Dr. Julio Licinio, lead author of the study and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Miami.
“If you have a drug that’s supposed to be causing something, the more of the drug that’s used, the more of the bad outcome you would have. What we show is the converse.”
Whille this new science will provide little solice to the parents I met, it will help mental health professionals, their patients — and their patients’ loved ones — better understand the value of available therapies.
And that’s important. Very.
There was no — none, zero talk of denial. Rather there was talk of trying to get straight what the enforcement procedures would be,” Crawford testified, according to a transcript of the May 24 deposition that was released late Monday by the Center for Reproductive Rights â which has sued to force the FDA to allow over-the-counter sales of Plan B for all ages.
So, there was no conspiracy to deny young women access to OTC sales of Plan B? What this depostion reveals is that Dr. Crawford was willing to make a tough decision and exercise leadership. He knew the political consequences of the perception of his actions and didn’t care. He is more of a mensch than the those who attacked him ever will be. Maybe all the media speculation and second -guessing about Dr. Crawford’s integrity and motivation will stop. Maybe all the hit and run attacks on the FDA fed to reporters by Sid Wolfe and his ilk will stop and we can actually have a rational discussion of how to make drug development faster and safer. Too much to hope for perhaps.
We can’t all have our own personal FDA. Not you. Not me. Not Senator Charles “I’m not a doctor but I play one on C-SPAN” Grassley, not Consumer Reports.
Consider Consumer Reports. Based on its “own” analysis of FDA data, it reached a significantly different conclusion than all of the scientists and food experts at the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN). Despite the fact that both the FDA and the EPA said that pregnant women should eat more fish — including tuna fish — Consumer Reports says the opposite. All the best science supports the FDA. All the lawyers support Consumer Reports. And who do you think gets the media coverage?
And as Senator Grassley moseys over to the Department of Health and Human Services today for another session of media-savvy grandstanding, we would all do well to remember the words of Dr. Mark Goldberger, director of FDA’s office of antimicrobial products:
“It’s more complex than it seems at first glance.”
Indeed.
This just in off the AP wire …
An experimental vaccine is showing promise against Alzheimer’s disease, reducing brain deposits that are blamed for the disorder.
The deposits have been cut by between 15.5 percent and 38.5 percent in mice, with no major side effects, researchers said Monday in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Tests of the DNA-based vaccine are under way in monkeys, and if those are successful, testing in people could begin, perhaps within three years, said lead researcher Yoh Matsumoto of the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Neuroscience in Japan.
If all goes well, this type of treatment might be available for people in six or seven years, he said.
Scientists estimate that as many as 4.5 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia. The illness, named after Dr. Alois Alzheimer, a German doctor who studied it in 1906, involves the parts of the brain that control thought, memory and language.
Its cause remains unknown, and while there is no cure some drugs can slow progress of the illness in people in the early and middle stages.
Other efforts to develop an Alzheimer’s therapy also are under way.
Two years ago, trials of a potential vaccine that seemed to help slow the memory decline caused by the disease were halted after several participants developed brain swelling.
Matsumoto said that problem did not occur in the tests of his vaccine.
The brains of people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease are cluttered with a plaque made up of a small protein called amyloid beta, or Ab.
In the mouse tests, the Ab deposits were reduced overall, and in certain parts of the brain the reduction was as much as 50 percent, the researchers said.
Dr. Sid Gilman, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan who has done research in vaccines for Alzheimer’s, said the new research showed the vaccine was efficient and safe in the mice.
He cautioned, however, that it’s very difficult to compare the level of efficiency from one trial to another, “so how effective this may be compared to other approaches is debatable.”
The reasons for the brain swelling in the earlier tests have been determined, Gilman said, and new forms of that therapy are now being tested.
A variety of clinical trials are under way looking at other potential treatments for Alzheimer’s including a hormone that might prevent brain cell death, several drugs, antioxidants, cholesterol-lowering medications and antibodies.
The Japanese research was funded by the ministry of education of Japan and the Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research.
I received a few media calls yesterday asking me if I thought there would be an outcry from “the religious right” about Gardasil potentially “causing” sexual promiscuity in teenage girls. My response: I have heard nil (the same amount as the number of goals scored by Team USA yesterday in the World Cup). Seems to me that in the light of such a really important public health advance that the media would be reporting on, well, a really important public health advance. The only thing I have heard (and I’m hearing it a lot) is that this new vaccine should become mandatory. And, indeed, I agree that it should.
I have been stewing about this drive by reporting or smear for a couple of days….This from an article in the Boston Globe, a piece on Chuck Grassley entitled “Watching the Watchdog” which recounts the various safety molehills Grassley has made mountains out of. He is never asked, in reference to his grave concern about the FDA being too cozy with industry, why it is perfectly kosher for the chairman of the Finance committee to have an FDA employee in his office, on his staff doing his bidding for free free at taxpayer expense when the guy should be at his desk at Rockville or White Oak.
But that is not the only thing: Grassley implies that the drug industry tried to whack one his staffers because of his heroic work on drug safety. This is a serious charge and the way it is laid out makes it seem that drug safety was the reason she was attacked: “
Grassley also has reason to be concerned about his staff’s well-being. Last November, his chief investigator, Emilia DiSanto , was attacked outside of her suburban Virginia home. The assailant, dressed in black, clubbed her with what appeared to be a baseball bat. The FBI and Capitol Police are still investigating and no arrests have been made. Grassley suspects DiSanto was targeted because of her work on drug safety and other matters.
“Unless the guy was a psychopath, it doesn’t seem to me like it was random,” he said. “If they had knocked her out with the first hit, she’d be dead. She was able to just survive and fight back, and the guy got scared and ran off.”
“She’s OK,” he added, “but, obviously, we [will] live with this for a long, long, long time.”
For the record, over the last year the Senate Finance Committee has scrutinized healthcare fraud, organ-donation procedures used by hospitals, drug-safety matters and the use of nonprofit groups related to former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. That still doesn’t mean there is any connection but in the context of the article it seems that drug safety work was the trigger for the attempted hit when in fact there could have been any number of forces. Why was this subject even introduced? To make Grassley into some sort of crusader? To smear the drug industry by association. Shouldn’t such an allegation have some supporting evidence instead of just hanging out there like some spitball? Both Grassley and the Globe should keep their suspicions to themselves. Enough for now. I have to take a shower.
From the Kaiser Foundation’s daily dose of depressing news about how health care in America generally sucks, this time another piece about how horribly the Medicare drug benefit is mistreating seniors and — above all - the poor, poor pharmacists from the mind of Robert Pear: “The New York Times on Sunday examined the effects of the Medicare drug benefit on beneficiaries, pharmacists and doctors in McAllen, Texas, a town near the Mexican border in the Rio Grande Valley. According to the Times, beneficiaries in the town are “hav[ing] difficulty getting the drugs they need,” and pharmacists and doctors “are struggling to figure out which drugs are covered by which plans.” In addition, pharmacists are “swamped with questions and complaints from beneficiaries” and “have run into many practical problems as they try to navigate a complex program administered by dozens of prescription drug plans, each with its own policies and procedures,” the Times reports (Pear, New York Times, 6/11).
Yes Robert, and somehow 90 percent of all seniors have managed to navigate this “complex program” as easily as you have been able to navigate around their successes. Perhaps you could write an article about you go about avoiding writing about their stories for so damn long without including the words clueless or bias…
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