The BMJ has published a study entitled: Factors associated with uptake of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) and use of single antigen vaccines in a contemporary UK cohort: prospective cohort study. Have a read of it all. The effects of the MMR vaccine-autism hoax are apparent. When looking at parents’ reasons for not immunising [...]
Mark Crislip provides a wonderful anecdote in his post about physician-pharma interactions:
After one of my intermittent outbursts against the involvement of big pharma in our conferences (I am the lone voice in this argument), the head of my hospital received an anonymous letter complaining about my behavior. The letter was ostensibly from a member of [...]
The President of my professional body has written to The Independent in favour of a legal obligation to publish all drug trials:
Sir: You report on a study from Hull University which questions the effectiveness of modern anti-depressants and raises important issues about the availability of data from drug trials (26 February).
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of [...]
Even accepting Ben Goldacre’s points about poor media reporting tagged on the end of his excellent post about the pharmaceutical industry’s failures to give the whole story about their products, prompted by the PLOS study on anti-depressants, it has to be accepted that the Independent’s front page lead screaming Drug giants warned: Tell the truth [...]
Goodness, There’s just been an earthquake. All the doors shook and the walls shimmered. This is a relatively unusual event for the West Midlands, although not unprecedented.
UPDATE: 5.3 in Lincolnshire
UPDATE 2: Post edited for an inexplicable attack of Famous Five speech patterns. I can confirm that Timmy the dog was not harmed in the [...]
This blog is now five years old. Here is the first ever post, and here is a post about its various incarnations.
“Today a million people wait on hospital waiting lists. The NHS is strangled by red tape, threatened with creeping privatisation, with more people feeling they have no alternative but to go private.”
So said Tony Blair, leader of the opposition, in April of 1997. The charge of creeping privatisation was leveled at the Conservatives after [...]
A friend emails me to say that this cartoon reminds him of me. It’s a curse I tell you.
There are plenty of instances of similar sounding drug names causing confusion and adverse events in patients, but this is the first time I’ve seen a similar sounding pharmaceutical factory causing adverse drug reactions.
The Chinese facility that supplies the active ingredient of the widely used blood thinner heparin was never inspected by the Food and [...]