""It discusses egregious violations within the Big Pharma sponsored US testing centers, not third-world testing centers...""
From the article:
"At the same time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has farmed out much of the responsibility for overseeing safety in these tests to private companies known as institutional review boards. These boards are also financed by pharmaceutical companies.
So, the drug industry is paying the people who do the tests -- and most of the people who regulate those tests. And that combination can be dangerous, and sometimes deadly.
``The fundamental problem is a system in which investor- owned businesses have control over the evaluation of their own products,'' says Marcia Angell, editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine from 1999 to 2000. ``Oversight of clinical trials is too important to leave in the hands of drug companies and their agents.''""
What I said in my post:
""Anybody read le Carre's "The Constant Gardner".
fiction, of course, but I think it gives a disturbing picture of what happens when there is no honest civil authorty to monitor or regulate the trials. Or course, those that think otherwise are quickly destroying our own regulatory agencies. So, in the end, the difference is only in the cost""
You see what I meant was that it is happening here--the dismantling of public, government (citizen) regulatory agencies that were created to monitor the private sector to be replaced by fake "self regulation"(( and/or business cronies put in charge of the public regulatory agency)) by BP (and whatever else--big oil to monitor the environment, lumber compnaies to moniter the effects of clear cutting, fishing companies to monitor fish stocks, mine companies to monitor mine safety, energy companies to moniter toxic emissions from their plants, meat processing companies to monitor for mad cow disease, on and on). The fox in charge of the chicken coop.
And then of course, there is "tort reform". A clever way for big business to get rid of the only thing left that is protecting us from them, civil litigation--which to me equates to civil rights. People shouldn't complain when they or their loved ones get poisoned or injured from unsafe products, poisoned air or water, etc, if they back "tort reform" then they want to give up their civil rights. So be it.
It was self evident that profit would overide health issues, so when there were real public servants, real patriotism, the peoples representatives established public regulatory agencies. Now, we are in a dangerous, human suicidal world of profit above all other considerations, and the belief that "the market" actually takes into account biology. Sanity and health, safety, and indeed the capability of the planet to sustain life, these considerations have been thrown away in order for the totally insane true believers can make money.
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