Sixty Percent of Canadian Clinical Trials Broke Rules

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Canadian physicians and psychiatrists regularly do not report serious negative side effects during their clinical trials of drugs, according to an investigation by the Toronto Star. “The doctors, some of them esteemed researchers from Canada’s most prestigious hospitals and academic institutions, have also routinely broken rules designed to protect participants, and botched research of new treatments.”

“Health Canada inspects a small number of the 4,000 drug trials running at any one time across the country,” reports the Star. “The inspection results are kept secret.”

Oversight of Canadian drug trials is so lax, says the Star, the problems have only come to light thanks to the fact that the US FDA inspects and reports on some Canadian trials of drugs targeted for the US market. Through freedom of information requests to the FDA, the Star then discovered for example that, “A Toronto hospital’s chief of medical staff ran a clinical trial of autistic children on a powerful antipsychotic, and he did not report side-effects suffered by four of the children.”

“The FDA found objectionable conditions in more than 60 per cent of the 192 study sites they have visited [in Canada] since 1981,” reports the Star.

Drug-testing rules broken by Canadian researchers (Toronto Star, September 16, 2014)

8 COMMENTS

  2. Yeah, I totally agree. Fines and payouts from lawsuits don’t do anything to discourage these people. The fines are just a small part of a drug company’s profits. The lawsuit recoveries are paid for by the doctor’s insurance company. As the saying goes, they’re “too rich to jail.” Apparently, criminal prosecutions are just for the little people…like us.

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  3. The late August / early September 2014 Economist magazine was pointing out this problem in the US also. It’s a flaw in the law, that corporations can be sued, rather than the people within the corporations that are committing the crimes. And the Economist stated that the US government was abusing these laws, and profiting big time off suing the corporations.

    So we’ve got the issue of the corporations harming the people for profit, then the government suing the corporations, but the people who were harmed don’t get compensated. It sure does seem the criminals are in charge. Frightening, and grotesquely unjust, really.

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