Lehman Brothers Building New York now Barclays Capital
©2009 Am Ang Zhang
As Barclays
was singled out amongst a number of UK
banks in the so called Libor price fixing scandal, heads might indeed fall on
the side of Bank
of England.
Is it a failure of the regulators? Only time will tell. At least Mr Bob Diamond is handing the government a neat £290 million. Nobody dies as a result.
In Health Care, regulatory failure tells a
different story. Failure of regulation often means death, and unnecessary death
at that. Worst if you have an organisation such as NICE
that actually set up protocols and made recommendations for treatment instead
of leaving it to doctors, the deaths are in-excusable.
In
my book The Cockroach Catcher:
.....The trust between the doctor and the patient has been
responsible for, as long as medicine is in existence, that mysterious force
that brings about healing and often cures. That is all but gone. Now doctors
have to act according to guidelines, protocols and rules, written or otherwise.
Interestingly there is as yet no guideline for guideline writers. Two of the
most commonly used drugs recommended by NICE for diabetes, which were
taken by hundreds of thousands of mostly overweight people in the U.K.
Well, GlaxoSmithKleine has
just been fined $3 Billion for Avandia, Paxil & Wellbutin.
The Guardian:
GSK
targeted the antidepressant Paxil (Paroxetine) at patients under age 18 when it
was approved only for adults, and promoted the drug Wellbutrin for uses it was not
approved for, including weight loss and treatment of sexual dysfunction,
according to a US
The
company went to extreme lengths to promote the drugs, such as distributing a
misleading medical journal article and providing doctors with meals and spa
treatments that amounted to illegal kickbacks, prosecutors said.
"The
sales force bribed physicians to prescribe GSK products using every imaginable
form of high-priced entertainment, from Hawaiian vacations [and] paying doctors
millions of dollars to go on speaking tours, to tickets to Madonna
concerts," said US attorney Carmin Ortiz.
In a third
case, GSK failed to give the US
The
misconduct began in the late 1990s and continued, in the case of Avandia's
safety data, through to 2007. GSK agreed to plead guilty to three misdemeanour
criminal counts, one each related to the three drugs.
Guilty
pleas in cases of alleged corporate misconduct are exceedingly rare, making
GSK's agreement especially unusual.
Remember my post in 2008:
Seroxat and Ribena
Now the story of Ribena has to be one of those sweet (sorry) stories one remembers for a long, long time. Nobody died either.
In Health Care, death unfortunately is irreversible.
GSK: Paroxetine: in the UK
marketed as Seroxat and in the US
[1]
Diabetes drugs recommended by National Institute for Health and Clinical
Excellence (NICE) were linked by scientists to heart
failure. Last year 1.8m prescriptions
were written across the UK, which scientists say equates to several hundred
thousand patients taking the drugs which are
recommended for use across the NHS by NICE. But researchers today call on NICE to think
again, revealing that as many as one in every 50 patients taking the drugs
Avandia (rosiglitazone) and Actos (pioglitazone) over a period of 26 months
will have to be hospitalised for heart failure.
[2]
Dr Steven E. Nissen - Drug Safety Critic Hurls Darts From the Inside
Dr.
Nissen is shaking up the nation’s pharmaceutical industry. His questioning of the safety of the Avandia
diabetes medication in late May, for example, prompted a federal safety alert
and led to a sales decline of about 30 percent for the drug, which brought in
$3.2 billion for GlaxoSmithKline last year. Now, with a federal panel soon to
decide whether it can remain on the market, Avandia’s future is uncertain.
The
drug is the latest example of why Dr. Nissen, 58, whose day job is chairman of
cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, has emerged as a Naderesque
figure and the nation’s unofficial arbiter of drug safety.
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