60 Minutes' Trasylol Report Is Shocking!
Posted by
Dan FrithFebruary 18, 2008 9:41 AMMy wife and I watch the CBS Show "60 Minutes" almost every week. We enjoy the more in-depth news stories provided by the show as opposed to the 30 seconds per story coverage often provided by the evening news stories.
Last night was interesting...but a story on Bayer Pharmaceutical Corporation's product called "Trasylol" had me seeing red!
Trasylol is a medication which was designed to reduce bleeding during cardiac surgery. The only problem is that the drug also causes renal (kidney failure). It appears that Bayer was aware of this complications and failed to reveal to federal drug officials the results of a large study suggesting that it heart-surgery medicine might increase the risks of death and stroke.
Bayer's memory lapse would be bad enough in itself, but it seems the FDA is particularly annoyed because Bayer scientists appeared at a public meeting with an FDA advisory committee on September 21, 2006, specifically set up to discuss the risks associated with Trasylol, and did not mention a word about the study or its negative findings.
The lethal side effects of Trasylol became public on February 8, 2006, when the FDA issued an advisory to healthcare professionals requesting that they limit the use of the drug based on research in the New England Journal of Medicine that found its use to be associated with a 2-fold increase in renal failure, a 48% increase in myocardial infarction, a 109% increase in heart failure, and a 181% increase in strokes.
Big Pharma is at it again and the FDA is clueless! The medical researcher interviewed for the 60 Minutes story concluded that 22,000 patients could have been saved if the FDA removed the heart surgery drug Trasylol two years ago, when his study revealed widespread death associated with it. Check out the 60 Minutes story here.
For more information on this subject, please refer to the National News Desk Trasylol feature article, and our trasylol information page.