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Computers located on the network controlled by pharma giant Abbott Laboratories have made over 1,000 edits to Wikipedia entries about the company and its products—according to WikiScanner, a tool created by 24-year-old scientist Virgil Griffith that analyzes public data about access to the online free-content encyclopedia.

Based on the data provided by the software tool, the public-advocacy group Patients Not Patents reports that "employees of Abbott Laboratories have been altering entries [...] to eliminate information questioning the safety of its top-selling drugs." The edits include the removal of a reference to a study indicating that patients taking an Abbott arthritis drug faced triple the risk of getting certain cancers.

The relationship between Abbott and consumer advocates has been acrimonious for some time, particularly when it comes to HIV issues. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company contemplated restricting an AIDS drug to its liquid form only, which was described as tasting like "someone else's vomit." Ultimately the company quintupled the price of the drug as part of an anti-competition strategy.

Other pharma companies whose computer networks have been implicated in Wikipedia-entry changes include AstraZeneca, according to the London Times.

PHOTO OF VIRGIL GRIFFITH, CREDIT: JAKE APPELBAUM

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June 01, 2007

Need a place to test your meningitis meds?

Posted by shawnsyms at 04:06 PM ET | Comments (0)

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is on the receiving end of criminal charges in Nigeria's largest state of Kano in the aftermath of what the Nigerian government says was an unethical drug trial.

According to a Washington Post report:

The government alleges that Pfizer researchers selected 200 children and infants from crowds at a makeshift epidemic camp in Kano and gave about half of the group an untested antibiotic called Trovan. Researchers gave the other children what the lawsuit describes as a dangerously low dose of a comparison drug made by Hoffmann-La Roche. Nigerian officials say Pfizer's actions resulted in the deaths of an unspecified number of children and left others deaf, paralyzed, blind or brain-damaged.
The lawsuit says that the researchers did not obtain consent from the children's families and that the researchers knew Trovan to be an experimental drug with life-threatening side effects that was "unfit for human use." Parents were banned from the ward where the drug trial occurred, the suit says, and the company left no medical records in Nigeria.

In another report on the case, the Post noted that Pfizer expected to gross $1-billion a year on Trovan in the United States. Revenue targets for Africa were likely a little bit smaller.

The Nigerian government says other health-promotion efforts in the nation have suffered as a result of the controversy. An 11-month boycott of efforts to vaccinate children against polio sprang from the mistrust that emerged from the Pfizer trial, they allege.

Pfizer denies any wrongdoing.

More entries on: Pharma

March 15, 2007

Drugs into bodies, money into pockets

Posted by shawnsyms at 03:06 PM ET | Comments (0)

When Big Pharma doesn't get its way, it takes its toys and goes home. When the "toys" in question are life-saving medications, the results can be grim. People with HIV in Thailand are finding this out first hand.

Most medications are protected by 20-year patents that allow a drugmaker the exclusive right to produce them and profit from them— but exceptions can be made for urgent medical situations in poor countries. A country can issue a "compulsory license" to allow for the generic manufacture of drugs its people urgently need but cannot afford.

That's what Thailand has done in the case of Kaletra, one of the new generation of HIV meds. Prior to that, the government in the developing nation had been trying without success to get Abbott Laboratories to lower its hefty annual $2,200-per-patient pricetag.

The Thai government's move was assailed by the Wall Street Journal, who called it a "seizure of foreign drug patents." Abbott responded by pulling its wares off Thai shelves. They have rescinded a request to register a new heat-resistant version of Kaletra in Thailand, along with several other Abbott products. This effectively prevents the government from allowing anyone to make a generic copy of the drug, because they will have no legal access to the original in order to test and assure they are equivalent.

Activists argue that this demonstrates putting profits over people's lives. The heat-resistant drug formulation was desperately needed in Thailand because there is no guarantee of refrigeration at all points in the drug's supply chain.

American law professor Brook K Baker, member of the advocacy group Health GAP, was particularly scathing. In a release, he described the withholding the registration for life-saving medicines "a new variant of pharmaceutical apartheid."

Baker assailed the notion the drug companies need to protect their patents because of R&D costs. He described Abbott as "a company which has been subsidized through NIH and university research for most of its discoveries, which gets huge taxes breaks for its research and development expenditures, and which earns monopoly profits on all its sales in rich country markets that collectively comprise 90% of global pharmaceutical sales."

The battling over profits in poor countries certainly appears greedy. Médecins sans Frontières also criticized the drug company, noting that in Thailand, newer "second-line" HIV drugs like Kaletra (which many patients need to turn to when older medicines no longer work for them), can cost up to 22 times more than first-line drugs, specifically because of patent protection.

In Thailand, where AIDS has become a leading cause of death, that's money most people just don't have.

More entries on: HIV/AIDS | Pharma | Poverty

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THIS MAGAZINE: BECAUSE EVERTHING IS POLITICAL

August 30, 2007

Ch-ch-ch-changes

June 01, 2007

Need a place to test your meningitis meds?

March 15, 2007

Drugs into bodies, money into pockets