Head of FDA China - Executed
June 18, 2007 14:15

China Issues Death Penalty For Mistakes Made by Head Drug Minister SUMMARY In the USA we don't hold those in the FDA accountable for their mistakes. We allow the injuries to occur to those taking dangerous drugs, leaving lawsuits as recourse. BODY Head of FDA China Executed for Accepting Pharmaceutical Drug Bribes The penalty in China is death, in America its business as usual. Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of China's FDA, was sentenced to death for accepting $832,000 in drug company bribes and for dereliction of duty. Like China, our country is in the middle of a drug and food safety crisis. Why is FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach, M.D. getting a free pass? Why did the Senate just pass legislation (S.1082) that gives von Eschenbach power to do whatever he pleases? Most of us would be shocked to know that drug safety or food supply safety is not the top FDA management priority. Preserving the profits of drug companies and furthering the myth that drugs are the answer to our health problems, is the FDA?s priority. The timing couldn't be worse for the FDA. On June 6, 2007, Henry Waxman (D-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will haul in Andrew von Eschenbach to testify on why the FDA failed to warn Americans of the extreme cardiovascular danger and increased risk of death from taking Avandia, a $3 billion blockbuster diabetes drug made by GlaxoSmithKline. Statistics that were primarily obtained from GlaxoSmithKline's own research data predict that 35,000 people needlessly died taking Avandia last year and the FDA was fully aware of the risks and chose to ignore them. Then there is the Trasylol scandal, a very expensive cardiovascular bypass drug that needlessly may have sentenced as many as 15,000 Americans per year to premature death within the next 5 years, according to statistics in the study published by the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2006. That study, by Dr. Mangano and colleagues, revelead that Trasylol ? (generic name aprotinin) increases the risk of kidney failure following heart surgery by more than 2 ? times (259%). . When Bayer was caught directly lying to the FDA regarding Trasylol's dangers, von Eschenbach deflected legal liability for Bayer by doing virtually nothing and leaving the drug on the market. These are just a few examples, there are unfortunately many more. As a result, the only recourse we have in the USA is to sue the manufacturer for damages. It is sad that there is no way to prevent these injuries under the way that the FDA currently operates. Instead, we leave it to the consumers to be injured and for the injured patients to then seek legal redress in the form of monetary damage lawsuits. While this does eventually lead manufacturers to correct mistakes in the drugs they produced, it is only after the biggest expense has been paid in the lives of those injured. Source: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=28383 KEYWORDS fda,trasylol,aprotinin,lawyers,lawsuits,drug,heart,surgery,cardiac