So sad (understatement)....

[KimberleyDawn]

http://www.youtube.com/v/XS3mhjt7TrY

[bcky2]

my first thought had to be that it is just a bunch of bull, how could something like this happen. and that is the most horrible part about it, it did happen :(

[KimberleyDawn]

I know and that's why I had to post this!

[chiqanita]

OMG


HOW EVIL!

[Puddy73]

Horrible, horrible, horrible! I will never buy Bayer products again.

Jennifer
Mommy to Annabelle 9/08/03 & Finn 10/31/05

"If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." - Jimmy Buffett

[kransden]

Here is the New York Times article http://tinyurl.com/mj7ff from 2003.

Karin and Katie 10/24/02

[starrynight]

It's sick and sad. But I'm not surprised. I don't trust any pharmacutical companies. They all do shady things, all dump unsafe drugs, expired vaccines, meds etc. overseas. They care about $$$ only. Those poor families :(.

[o_mom]

They don't ALL do shady things and they don't only care about $$$. This is obviously a situation where the company was very, very wrong. However, most everyone who works at a pharmaceutical company cares very much about the patients and the science and really aren't motivated by money.

[tina-t]

Really, really sad. Distributing drugs that they know is tainted with the HIV virus is horrible!

[TonFirst]

Very well said. Please don't judge the entire pharmaceutical industry based on one company's aggregious actions.

[mommy111]

UGH, UGH, UGH.....

[Sillygirl]

The NYT article seems to gloss over the fact that it took over a year for all the blood banks and the BB industry to stop distributing HIV infected products here in the US, and hundreds of people were infected needlessly. It wasn't as though they were ultra-careful with the US either. "And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts is a great book for more of the history of the early epidemic in this country.

[momathome]

Agreed. My dh is a medicinal chemist working in drug discovery at a major pharmaceutical company who just sent a drug to fight cancer into clinical trials. Not all pharmaceutical companies are evil and many donate millions of dollars in drugs to 3rd world nations to help out those less fortunate. That, of course, rarely gets advertised.

[o_mom]

This is much more balanced and my guess is that the truth is somewhere in between the two sides.

[BaileyBea]

Okay I did some research:

Apparently it's real:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=23488&nfid=rssfeeds

http://www.injuryboard.com/view.cfm/Topic=1004


"In May 2003, The New York Times reported that several major drugmakers, including Bayer and Baxter, knowingly supplied hemophilia patients with Factor VIII, which is made from donated blood, even though many units were tainted with the HIV or hepatitis C virus. It is believed that thousands of patients from dozens of countries were exposed to the diseases from 1978 to 1990. In August 2003, seven Taiwanese patients who allege they developed HIV from tainted Factor VIII during the mid-1980s sued Bayer and Aventis. Bayer has been accused of selling a safer version of Factor VIII in the United States during this period while continuing to sell the high-risk version outside of the country."


Here's the NY Times article. I haven't read it all yet but it seems to say that they knew about it for at least a year.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9A00E4DA1F3EF931A15756C0A9659C8B63

So very Constant Gardener! Did anyone see that movie?

Also they had more on this website:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread209455/pg1

[mommy_someday]

>So very Constant Gardener! Did anyone see that movie?

Yes, and that's **exactly** what I thought of when I watched the clip in the OP! How incredibly awful that any company can do that to innocent people. :(

[kath68]

That is truly one of my favorite movies. Very compelling in a depressing kind of way. Not exactly a happy ending.

BTW, Frontline has a new two-part series on the AIDS epidemic. The first part discusses briefly the problem with Factor VIII and the refusal of the blood banks to screen blood early on. Part II in on tonight in my area, anyway.

With regards to the pharm. companies. Of course there are many devoted souls who do good work. And there are good companies, too. What I find most disturbing is the lobbying arm of the industry and the choke hold it seems to have on our government. The new medicare plan is a joke, and a huge financial gift to the industry (on the backs of taxpayers).

I doubt there is much dispute that the drug industry as a whole is extremely profitable. Some of that is warranted, based on the good products they produce. I am all for capitalism and healthy profits. Some of it, though, is because of questionable marketing practices -- the Factor VIII issue is just an example. Another is the way some pharms push certain drugs on the market prematurely (with the FDA in their back pocket -- again, there is a great Frontline on the drug industry/FDA connection -- fox guarding the henhouse, really).

Just my two cents -- not that you asked. :)

[TonFirst]

Hee! In my past life (pre-baby) I *was* a pharmaceutical lobbyist! We're not all evil, I promise.

I don't ncessarily disagree with you on the Medicare plan - many seniors (including my grandmother) did better with the drug company discount cards, like Lilly Answers and the Pfizer Share Card. But please remember that many, many senior Americans demanded that Medicare benefit in no uncertain terms, regardless of the repercussions the benefit would have for generations of younger Americans.

[brittone2]

So so sad.

My DH worked as a chemist at a major pharma company for 5 years before deciding to leave to pursue his PhD full time. We both feel so ethically conflicted about whether or not he'll ever return to that industry. There is so much good, valuable work that can and needs to be done, and I believe that the vast majority of employees care about the products they work on and the patients they will help.

Unfortunately, in a company where the process, start to finish, is so extraordinarily long, any one individual in R&D only sees such a small part of the process. As drugs move through the various phases of development, new researchers take over, and new people fall into the supervisory roles, and those roles switch many times in the course of a single drug being developed from start to finish.

The very upper level decision makers are the ones that seem to not always exercise the best ethical judgment. I don't believe that 99 percent of employees have anything to do with the horror stories that occur. The people at the top get to call the shots, and sometimes their decisions lead to disastrous outcomes.

I also think this case w/ Bayer illustrates again why more people should be outraged about the FDA and CDC and the conflicts of interest that exist with their members. For example, vaccine patent holders like Paul Offit serving on the CDC advisory committee for immunization practices. It just doesn't make sense IMO.

Whether you are pro vax, pro non vax, pro pharma or not, the ethical conflicts that exist at the CDC and FDA should make your hair stand on end IMO. It just makes corruption way too easy IMO. And there are so many people at the FDA and CDC that are major stockholders in big pharma, or are consultants to big pharma, or otherwise connected in ways that make me very suspicious about what goes on behind the scenes. It just should not be tolerated.

I think those connections are partially to blame for why we've seen so many drugs be pushed onto the market prematurely, only to end up with disastrous outcomes.

edited to clarify

[kath68]

I guess you just never know who is reading this board! ;)

That's so interesting that you were a lobbyist! Any desire to go back to it? Oh, I know all lobbyists aren't evil -- I have from time to time dabbled in a little lobbying myself, for a bar association (yup, I am an "evil" trial attorney! I bet we can swap stories about our misunderstood compadres).

I know what you mean about seniors demanding the drug benefits -- speaking of lobbying, what about the AARP?! But I don't think most of them envisioned *this* plan. :)