With clinical trials now mainly overseas, will more Americans die?

[truedelphi]

Full article:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/deadly-medicine-201101

Deadly Medicine -- TAKE TWO ASPIRIN
More and more clinical trials for new drugs are being outsourced overseas
and conducted by companies for hire. Is oversight even possible?

Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year. Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas —
on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where
regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t and cannot reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves?

The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry,
and the U.S. Government’s failure to rein in a lethal profit machine.

By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele



In 2009, according to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, 19,551 people
died in the United States as a direct result of the prescription drugs they took.
That’s just the reported number. It’s decidedly low, because it is estimated that
only about 10 percent of such deaths are reported. Conservatively, then, the
annual American death toll from prescription drugs considered “safe” can be put
at around 200,000.

That is three times the number of people who die every year
from diabetes, four times the number who die from kidney disease. Overall, deaths from F.D.A.-approved prescription drugs dwarf the number of people who die from street drugs such as cocaine and heroin. They dwarf the number who die every year in automobile accidents. So far, these deaths have triggered no medical crusades, no tough new regulations. After a dozen or so deaths linked to runaway Toyotas, Japanese executives were summoned to appear before lawmakers in Washington and were subjected to an onslaught of humiliating publicity. When the pharmaceutical industry meets with lawmakers, it is mainly to provide campaign contributions.

And with more and more of its activities moving overseas, the industry’s behavior
will become more impenetrable, and more dangerous, than ever.
For full article, see link at top of text.

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With some big thanks to "Brookline" from another onsite venue