Eighteen months ago and amid enormous fanfare, pharmaceutical giant Merck announced that it had produced the first vaccine against cancer. Gardasil would fight against the human papillomavirus that caused cervical cancer and the target would be *** girls, who would be protected before they have sex. The launch of Gardasil has been so successful ...

What shall we do with the drug companies?  The year is only a few weeks old but already they've been caught out on two occasions suppressing vital data that revealed their drugs weren't working anywhere near as well as they have claimed.  In the first case - involving the cholesterol-lowerting drug Zetia (ezetimibe) - the truth ...

Last month, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took the unprecedented step of requesting that pharmaceutical companies take a list of cold remedies for children off the market. Rarely has such a sweeping and categorical ban ever occurred, but the evidence surfacing regarding deaths related to these drugs has become difficult to ignore, even ...

Avandia, the diabetes drug that causes heart failure, has regularly been given to patients. . .with heart failure. The practice is so common that one medical trial even focused on 224 patients with congestive heart failure who were taking the drug.  Not surprisingly, it was a massacre.  Five per cent died, 13 per cent reported a ...

Avandia (rosiglitazone), the diabetes drug, may soon be pulled from markets around the world after a study discovered it increased the risk of heart attack by 45 per cent.  America's drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has issued an urgent safety alert, and is likely to follow up with a complete ban ...

America's senators have missed an enormous opportunity to give their citizens genuine protection against a pharmaceutical industry that is all too rarely brought to account.  Instead they voted overwhelmingly in favour of moves that draw the industry and the drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, even closer together. The ...