Big Pharma wants to run medical experiments on your babies

Big Pharma wants to run medical experiments on your babies


(NaturalNews) Before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
approves a new drug, pharmaceutical companies have to demonstrate
through drug trials on humans that their drugs are, supposedly, safe.
Unfortunately, many of these tested-on-human-guinea-pigs medications
turn out to have serious side effects that aren't discovered until
countless people have taken these meds for many years after FDA
approval. Even more worrisome is deliberate and illegal covering-up of
potentially deadly side effects of prescription drugs.

These
issues aren't slowing down the push for more drugs and more drug
testing, however. In fact, in a commentary just published in the Journal of Pediatrics, Henry Akinibi, MD, and his colleagues from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati are calling for Big Pharma to work with academics to conduct more human drug tests on a special group -- newborn babies.

Dr.
Akinibi argues that children, especially neonates, are an
"underrepresented population" when it comes to drug experiments. Out of
more than 120,000 studies at the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) clinical trials repository, only 0.6 percent involve neonates; in
total, only 3.4 percent of all registered pediatric studies involve
newborns. He puts the blame on many factors, such as extra regulations
required to experiment on children, no adult equivalents of many newborn
health problems to give researchers a starting point for trying various
drugs, the unique physiology of newborns and, of course, not enough financial incentives for pharmaceutical companies.

The
result, Akinibi and his team write, is that many physicians prescribe
adult-approved drugs for children in off-label and unapproved uses and
without any clinical trials at all. The safety of this practice is often
unknown and could obviously be placing newborns at risk for unknown
side effects and other dangers. So, the authors of The Journal of Pediatrics commentary write, the answer is for the drug
industry to work with academics to come up with study designs for
newborns and for more funds to test more drugs on these babies.

While no one wants sick or otherwise fragile newborns to not receive medical
care and help, increasing the number of drug tests on babies is
worrisome for many reasons. One important concern is the discovery of
bogus drug trial results that have been used to push dangerous drugs. No
one knows for sure how often this happens because we only hear about
instances where Big Pharma is caught and prosecuted.

A
case in point: last summer the U.S. Justice Department fined drug giant
GlaxoSmithKline $3 billion to resolve federal criminal and civil
inquiries arising from the company's illegal promotion of some of its
products and failure to report safety issues -- including the hidden
fact that the diabetes drug Avandia increases the risk of congestive
heart failure and heart attack. What's more, as Natural News recently reported, a study in the journal Nature
documented an epidemic of phony research data and fraudulent research ,
fueled in part by greed for grant money, which also throws the whole
accuracy of drug safety into question.

Source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/037728_Big_Pharma_medical_experiments_infants.html