E-drug: Pharmaceutical companies' response to drug safety issues
---------------------------------------------
Last month I posted a message on E Drug about how quickly drug companies
react to issues of public safety. I received a private message which
indicated that in the cases of Rezulin (troglitazone) and Trovan
(trovafloxacine), the companies had acted quickly to pull their drugs
off the shelves. Within 5 weeks of the announcement of the
withdrawal of Rezulin sales were 0.5% of those before the
announcement. The comparable figure for Trovan was about 2%. While
these figures are encouraging there are still some questions. Did
the sales drop because doctors stopped prescribing the products or
because the companies recalled them from drugstore shelves? Even if
the latter explanation is the one, in the case of both of these drugs
and especially Rezulin, there were major questions about safety long
before the companies agreed to withdraw them. Was this delay
motivated by true scientific disagreement about the level of risk or
because the companies wanted to get as much money out of them as
possible before facing the inevitable? Finally, are these two examples
the way companies generally respond or are they exceptions?
Joel Lexchin
--
Joel Lexchin MD
121 Walmer Rd.
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5R 2X8
T: +416-964-7186
F: +416-923-9515
e mail: joel.lexchin@utoronto.ca
--
Send mail for the `E-Drug' conference to `e-drug@usa.healthnet.org'.
Mail administrative requests to `majordomo@usa.healthnet.org'.
For additional assistance, send mail to: `owner-e-drug@usa.healthnet.org'.