Missing a story this morning
We promoted a story from the front page this morning and then failed to print it inside. (It appears below.) We ran a Page One digest item in column one headlined “Drug troubles.” It read “FDA order in 1998 led to a tripling of reports of troubles with prescription drugs. A leading troublemaker: painkillers.” That blurb hooked several readers, who called to complain that the story didn’t appear on A5 as advertised.
The story didn’t make the paper because the continuation of a front-page story was longer than anticipated and needed more space inside. But when the drug story was pulled, we overlooked the Page One promo.
Here’s the missing story:
Number of adverse
reactions attributed
to prescription drugs
has almost tripled,
researchers find.
By Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times
The number of serious adverse events and deaths attributed to prescription medications has nearly tripled since the Food and Drug Administration initiated a system in 1998 to make it easier to report significant side effects, researchers said Monday.
Twenty percent of drugs accounted for 87.1 percent of adverse effects, and the biggest offenders were painkillers and drugs that modify the immune system to treat arthritis, according to the report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
One-quarter of the increase could be attributed to a boost in prescriptions and another 15 percent to the introduction of new biotechnology drugs since 1998, but the rest of the increase could not be explained, said drug safety expert Thomas J. Moore of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices in Huntingdon Valley, Pa.
“The clear finding is that we are losing ground in terms of drug safety, and that ought to be of great concern,” said Moore, who led the study.
Both the FDA and a trade group representing drug makers agreed that the number of reported adverse events had been increasing, but they attributed much of the rise to an increase in voluntary reporting of the events. Studies have estimated that from as few as 3 percent of adverse events to a maximum of about 33 percent have been reported to the FDA.
“There are clearly other factors responsible for this increase, such as the increase in public attention to drug safety and use of the Internet to make it easier for the public to … report adverse events to the FDA,” said Dr. Gerald Dal Pan, director of the FDA’s office of surveillance and epidemiology.
Moore and his colleagues analyzed all of the serious adverse-event drug reports submitted to the FDA through its Adverse Event Reporting System, commonly known as MedWatch reports. Physicians and the public submit reports to the FDA or to drug makers, which are then required to forward them to the FDA.
The new system upgraded the FDA’s Spontaneous Reporting System to increase the efficiency with which the agency received, filed and analyzed the reports.
Adverse events are those defined as resulting in death, a birth defect, disability, hospitalization or requiring intervention to prevent harm.
The number of such events grew from 34,966 in 1998 to 89,842 in 2005. During the same period, the number of deaths rose from 5,519 to 15,105.
From 1998 to 2005, the number of prescriptions written each year grew by 25 percent.
Moore and others agreed that the FDA needed more funding to monitor drugs.
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Perhaps this was caused because you were more excited about doing a long hit piece on the Blunt Administration that was forced on you by a left-wing blogger about Mr. Martin calling a bunch of Mexicans a bunch of Mexicans. What should he have called them, a bunch of waspy soccer moms? This country is out of control.
P.S. And whatever you do at the PD, NEVER, I repeat, NEVER, mention that the Bush Administration, the morons, the Constitution destoyers, the torcherers, have some how by the grace of God kept us from another attack for six years, unlike London, Spain, Algeria, Indonesia, India, Russia, etc.