Donald W. Light, Ph.D., is Professor of Comparative Health Care Systems and Director of the Division of Social and Behavioral Medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey
MEDICINE. According to a study conducted by the University of New Jersey, 85 percent of the products placed on the market would pose serious health risks. 42 percent of medicines lack clinical trials.
Not only would they not cure, but most of the new drugs would pose serious risks due to their toxicity or misuse. The alarm raised by an American study conducted by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and presented two days ago at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta, Georgia, concerns about 85 percent of the products placed on the market .
Donald Light, professor of comparative medicine and author of the research, did not hesitate to attack the drug industry: "Sometimes pharmaceutical companies hide or minimize information on the serious side effects of new drugs and overestimate the benefits of the drugs themselves".
According to Light, a sociologist and health policy expert at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, who is about to publish the book The Risk of Prescription Drugs, multinationals "spend twice or even three times as much on marketing as research, to convince doctors to prescribe these new drugs.
The research found that out of 111 applications for final approval of a drug, 42 percent lacked adequate clinical trials, 40 had violations in dosage tests, 39 lacked evidence of clinical efficacy, 49 indicated the risk of serious adverse effects. Virtually 4 out of 5 new drugs on the market offer no additional benefit for patients.
There are many cases in support of Doctor Light's accusation, some of which are recent and known to the general public. Above all, the gloomy story of the vaccines for swine fever (influenza A subtype H1N1), which went down in history as "the 2009 flu pandemic", would stand out.
Transmitted from pigs to humans, it caused some victims in Mexico before spreading around the world and creating confusion and fears, as well as great media alarm also in the face of the WHO's decision to raise the alert level to 6, the maximum. Every nation tightened security measures, and in Italy the government signed a vaccine production contract with the Swiss multinational Novartis for a public cost of 184 million euros (Poland's health minister, Ewa Kopacz, accused states of having concluded an agreement that was only in the interest of the pharmaceutical companies, and refused the vaccine).
Or even the prescriptive restrictions of nimesulide, known under the trade name of Aulin. Italy was and is the but
