Diabetes drug turns deadly
Once again, my buddies at the FDA seem more concerned with protecting Big Pharma’s profits than protecting the American people. In spite of the fact that there are newly reported incidents of deadly side effects from a brand-name diabetes drug, the FDA is not calling for the drug to be pulled from the market.
Instead, it’s “seeking a stronger, more prominent warning” about the risks of Byetta. Oooh I bet Big Pharma’s shaking in its boots, huh?
Byetta is the brand name for Exenatide, a synthetic hormone used to treat adults with Type 2 diabetes. More than 700,000 patients have used the drug since it was introduced three years ago.
I’d say this was a joke if I didn’t think it was such a crime. Recently, six new cases of a particularly deadly variety of pancreatitis were reported – all of which were tied to Byetta. In two of these cases, the patients died. Yet the only action that FDA officials took was to issue a statement that patients should stop taking the drug immediately if they develop acute pancreatitis.
What’s even more maddening about the FDA’s pathetic response to this crisis is that the federal agency had issued an alert about THE SAME PROBLEM with Byetta in October of last year! At the time, Byetta’s manufacturers agreed to add additional information about these issues to the drug’s label.
Byetta is marketed by both Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Eli Lilly & Co. The $636 million in sales that was generated by Byetta in 2007 represented a whopping 80 PERCENT of Amylin’s sales (though just 3 percent of Eli Lilly’s sales). If Byetta were to be pulled from the market – even temporarily – the market share would take a big hit – which would leave an opening for rival diabetes drugs from other Big Pharma companies GlaxoSmithKline and Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
The stakes are high: the health care research company IMS puts the global market for diabetes drugs in the region of $24 billion!
Need some more proof that the patient has become secondary to profit in the world of Big Pharma? The Associated Press story about this issue with Byetta was written by the business reporter. And the story wrapped up with an investment analyst pondering how the news of the pancreatitis deaths could affect Amylin’s stock prices.
Some sicknesses can’t be treated by doctors.
For years, the medical community has pinned the rising rates of Type II diabetes on the fatty, fast food diet of many Americans. But now a new study reveals that it may not be what we’re eating that’s giving us diabetes, but what we’re drinking. Nope, it’s not soda, lemonade, or coffee but water.
Apparently, millions of people in America and around the globe are guzzling down water that’s contaminated with arsenic. According to a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the water supplies of as many as 13 million Americans is corrupted by an amount of inorganic arsenic that’s well above the Environmental Protection Agency standard of 10 micrograms per liter.
When I say “inorganic” arsenic, I mean arsenic that’s not naturally occurring; in other words, its junk left over from man-made things like industrial waste. Arsenic has no taste, color or smell, and at high levels it’s deadly – as anyone who’s ever read “Arsenic and Old Lace” can tell you.
The researchers concluded that the participants in the study with the highest arsenic levels were 3.6 times as likely to have Type II diabetes.
As for these researchers, I think it would’ve been nice for them to release exactly WHICH 13 million Americans are exposed to this tainted drinking water but they didn’t. Government cover-up, anyone?
As if fluoride, chlorine, and pharmaceuticals in the water aren’t bad enough, this is just one more reason to purchase a reverse osmosis filtration system for your tap water.
