Are you alive because of this drug review of Vioxx?

On Tuesday, the National Post had a headline that screamed … “Health Canada not giving timely warnings about pharmaceutical drugs: Auditor General”

I tell you that certainly grabbed my attention as I, along with pretty much all of us have a need for prescription drugs at various times.  Here in part is what the story had to say:

“Health Canada is slow to act on potential issues that it identifies … time lag, outlined in an audit tabled Tuesday in the House of Commons and characterized as “serious,” means people sometimes have to wait more than two years before Health Canada completes a drug safety review of a product already on the market and provides updated information about their risks… the audit also found gaps in transparency that are keeping Canadians in the dark about Health Canada’s drug-safety work …”

Did you catch that?  They are saying that their is a serious time line gap to warn us of problems (serious perhaps) on drugs that are already in the marketplace … there are gaps in transparency in information we are getting from Health Canada on drug safety!!

This of course follows on the brilliant move of the Therapeutic Institute at UBC being virtually castrated by the BC Government – something I previously wrote and made comment on late last year and earlier this year.  Here is what another story from the National Post also had to say at the time, in a story entitled “Censoring BC’s Health Care Jewel”: 

In 1994, with about a million dollars a year in funding from the B C government, the University of British Columbia started an outfit called the Therapeutics Initiative. The Therapeutics Initiative (TI) exists to provide independent, skeptical analyses of clinical data about new health therapies to the medical and pharmaceutical professions --and to the government, which has used TI's advice to decide which drugs its Pharmaceutical Services Division (PSD) should foot the bill for. Much of the TI's job consists of cutting through drug company spin, and it has earned an international reputation for doing so. Its director, Jim Wright, is considered a big wheel in the world of evidence-based medicine (EBM) -- a worldwide cult of grouchy physicians and pharmacists who insist on seeing hard data, and lots of it, before they believe in the power of the latest marketing-driven prescribing fad.

Got it?  Independent research to cut through drug company spin, on products that perhaps were not quite as wonderful as all the glossy brochures and giveaways indicated.

Here’s just one of the things they gave warning on --- and which saved the lives of hundreds of British Columbians.  This again is from the same National Post story:

Rofecoxib's trade name was Vioxx: you might remember it disappearing from the shelves because of those cardiac concerns in 2004, in what was perhaps history's largest-ever voluntary drug recall. TI's (Therapeutic Institutes)early warnings about the Vioxx data, as well as its complaints about the reporting of trial evidence on other COX-2 inhibitors, led to restricted prescribing in B. C. compared with other provinces. That saved lives -- about 500, by one estimate. It saved money, too.

Indeed, TI's first-do-no-harm approach to new, oppressively over-marketed drugs has been credited -- by the auditor-general of B. C., among many others -- with keeping overall drug costs much lower in B. C. than elsewhere.

This was a do-no-harm check on both the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of new drugs --- and one that in just one instance is credited with savings the lives of no less than 500 people.  Are you alive because of this drug review of VIOXX … do you have a friend who is … or perhaps parent or grand-parent??

Read on … here’s more from the National Post story:

“… the BC government launched a task force to review its decision-making process for funding new drugs and devices, TI might have been expected to receive accolades. Unfortunately, the committee was stacked with members who had past and present connections to the drug business, while the EBM community was sidelined. When the task force's report came out in April, it contained a hysterical revenge attack on TI.”

While the words of physicians from around the world gave the Therapeutic Institute praise for being “independent" … the report from a task force (again stacked with drug company hacks) instead said that the TI was "narrow" and "insular"

Here again is what the National Post said … Note how that buzzword "stakeholder" puts the B C taxpayer and the vulnerable patient on an equal footing with drug vendors.

They concluded their story by saying:

“… the vicious, bizarre task force report only confirms the wisdom of the stringent attitudes it has taken in the past toward drug-industry money and its effects on sound judgment. Unless Mr. Abbott comes to his senses he will be discarding what the citizens of British Columbia ought to regard as a rare jewel.”

Let me ask you this … Do you as a patient, want to be put on an equal level with the financial needs of a pharmaceutical corporation??

On June 21^st a group of physicians, pharmacists, and health care practitioners sent a letter to Christy Clark asking her government to, “… reverse the decision made by your predecessor to cut the funding the Therapeutic Institute …” and reminding her that this would “… allow your government to demonstrate that it is commuted to the public interest …”

I have yet to see, hear, or read anything to say funding has been restored … and again now we have Tuesday’s story about concerns from the Federal Auditor General on the safety of drugs being prescribed to you and me … and our children.  I’m concerned … how about you?

I’m Alan Forseth in Kamloops, with the thoughts of one conservative.

NOTE
This link provides copies of the original ‘full stories’ by writers of the Victoria Times Colonist, the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, Canadian Wire, the Tyee and others.