Doctors get the "Yellow Card"

Pharmaceutical companies have to jump through many hoops in order to get their new drugs approved and to earn their licences.  But it being suggested that once they have the licence, all the controls from food and drug administrators go out of the window.

The British Medical Journal reports that information which questions the safety of the drugs often gets hidden whilst positive test results are “massaged” supported by interesting interpretations of trial results.

To counter this argument, the American FDA is introducing closer monitoring of a drug’s adverse events once it has been prescribed.  This requires doctors to report to the regulator, any side effects which patients feedback to them.  

Sadly, this system of “Yellow Cards” has been in place in the UK for the past 30 years but it’s reckoned that doctors only report about 5% of adverse reactions and so the scheme has virtually fallen into dis-use.  France has an even worse record, where it’s estimated that doctors report just one in 20 000 drug reactions.

Edith Maskell of Bromley Health Management suggests that patients who are prescribed a variety of drugs, in other words, taking a virtual medicated “cocktail”, it must be very difficult for a doctor to differentiate between what is or isn’t a reaction to a particular drug, that patients report anyway”.

(Source : British Medical Journal, 2007; 334: 290-1).

Monday, 9 April 2007