Reuters reports that the FDA plans on lifting an existing ban on airline pilots taking antidepressant medication while flying. It’s about time… whoever thought it would be a good idea to have a depressed person directly responsible for several hundred lives?
-Michael B. Sauter
One of the more interesting and bizarre crimes in recent memory occurred last month when several apparently professional thieves broke into the Eli Lilly warehouse (by cutting a hole in the ceiling!) and stole millions worth of prescription drugs (mostly antidepressants.) Since the most chemically imbalanced person in the world wouldn’t need this much Prozac, officials suspect that a sizable portion of the stolen stock will end up on the black market.
The New York Times reports that while some percentage of these pills will likely be sold for recreational use, there is evidence to suggest that the Eli Lilly drugs are currently being repackaged (cut, in some cases, with other drugs, or reduced in dosage) and resold in legitimate venues, usually without the knowledge of the pharmacy. While the warehouse theft was the first such incident to make big news in recent memory, the process of illegally re-marketing stolen drugs has been going on for years. These cases are often only discovered when patients report having had strange reactions to drugs they’ve been on for months, and further investigation identifies some additional chemical in the pills, or that they haven’t been stored in the proper conditions, which can alter composition and effects.
As our national health system gears up to enter a post health bill era where we hope to cut costs by reducing inefficiencies in the system, there’s nothing like some good, old-fashioned moral hazard to make it really feel like home again. The New York Times Reports that last month, the FDA approved AstraZeneca’s cholesterol drug Crestor to be used as preventative medicine for people without existing heart problems.
Besides the fact that there are some actual health risks involved with taking the drug on a regular basis (a potential 9% increase in likelihood for type-2 diabetes, for starters) there’s also that boring little problem that people are now going to be picking this stuff up like hotcakes every time their heart skips a beat or they have a mild cardiac arrest. And now that millions more of our paranoid population are going to be covered, thanks to the aforementioned health bill, guess who’s going to be paying for the fact that people will be popping the not-cheap drug like its Aspirin? The taxpayer, that’s who. Thanks, Socialism.
-Michael B. Sauter
The New York Times Reports that last month, GlaxoSmithKline (the pharmaceutical company that can do nothing right) recalled a popular dental adhesive called Super Poligrip from the market because it contained high levels of Zinc, and some people who used the cream had shown some adverse symptoms associated with the effects of Zinc poisoning (they were dying.) Zinc – you probably know it as the last ingredient listed on your unopened bottle of Centrum. You may also be familiar with its usage as an anti-corrosive, a component used to galvanize steel, and an adhesive agent in denture creams. What you probably didn’t know is that studies like this one (from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) have identified the metal as a toxic agent, and that long-term exposure to it can lead to nerve damage, anemia, and death.
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The New York Times reports that a group of disgruntled scientists in the FDA are planning on testifying that their superiors ignored their reports on the dangers of using CT scans – a common form of diagnostic radiation – in place of colonoscopies. The members claim that they had determined there to be a significant carcinogenic risk of the scan, and believe that roughly 14,000 people die each year from tumors caused by the controversial treatment. The FDA, they assert, chose to ignore and bury their reports as they sought to approve the G.E. manufactured scanner for usage in diagnostic imaging of the colon.
After reading this, anyone who thinks the FDA’s first priority will always be our health may need to get their head examined… with a dangerously radioactive scanner.
-Michael B. Sauter