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Toyota Recall: Speed and Greed?

January 28th, 2010. By janem

Perhaps car makers, Toyota in particular, should figure out how crash test dummies can work a worn gas pedal–it might have saved lives. The latest accelerator recall is none too soon: In March 2007 Toyota began receiving reports that pedals were operating roughly or were slow to return to the idle position in the Tundra pickup, and again in December 2008, similar problems with its Aygo and Yaris models.

Toyota reported the Tundra problem was fixed in February 2008 and said it lengthened a part and changed the material to fix Aygo and Yaris, starting in August 2009. But the world’s largest auto maker recently seems to be plagued with even bigger problems.

On its website, Toyota says that “certain accelerator pedal mechanisms may, mechanically stick in a partially depressed position or return slowly to the idle position…it can occur when the pedal mechanism becomes worn and, in certain conditions, the accelerator pedal may become harder to depress, slower to return or, in the worst case, stuck in a partially depressed position.”  YIKES!

Just months ago, the company recalled of 4.2 million vehicles due to its gas pedals getting trapped under floor mats, causing sudden acceleration. Several crashes, including a number of fatalities, prompted that recall. This recent recall involves eight models affecting more than 2.3 million vehicles.

Toyota has one of the best track records for building safe cars, so why has it gone off the rails-or I should say, assembly line? Perhaps greed is a component. Analysts say the company’s former president, Katsuaki Watanabe, was a cost-cutting expert with an aggressive growth strategy that landed Toyota into the Number 1 global sales spot two years ago, beating out General Motors.

Wanna know what happened to Watanabe? In 2006, the Japanese government launched a criminal investigation into accidents suspected of being linked to vehicle problems, though nobody was charged. Watanabe later acknowledged overzealous growth was behind the quality problems.

Last year, Watanabe was replaced by Akio Toyoda, the grandson of Toyota’s founder. I bet Toyoda is pissed.

Toyota predicts that 2.19 million vehicles will be sold in North America in 2010, up 11 per cent from 2009. Globally, Toyota said it was planning sales of 8.27 million vehicles this year, up 6 per cent from 2009. But those targets might need to be tweaked somewhat…

Tags: defective auto, Toyota, toyota recall
Posted in Defective Products | 2 Comments »

WHO Fights Back Over “Fake Pandemic” Accusations

January 18th, 2010. By janem

The World Health Organization (WHO) is almost in fisticuffs over recent accusations that it exaggerated the H1N1 threat. “The world is going through a real pandemic,” said Dr. Fukuda, the WHO’s special adviser on pandemic influenza. “The description of it as fake is both wrong and irresponsible.”

On January 15th the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) released the latest statistics–  based on two nationwide telephone surveys–about  H1N1 fatalities, infection rates and inoculations covering the first eight months of the “pandemic” from April through mid-December. According to the surveys, about 55 million people contacted the infectious virus, nearly 246,000 needed hospitalization and around 11,160 died from the flu.

Do these statistics sound like a pandemic? CDC estimated that about 36,000 people died of seasonal flu-related causes each year during the 1990s in the US. So why don’t we have a pandemic alert every year?  It makes you wonder: Is the CDC and WHO collaborating with big pharma companies like Glaxo Smith Kline? Surely GSK can afford to bank roll them with the profits they are making from their H1N1 vaccine.

Meanwhile, health officials and hospitals nationwide report that the outbreak has waned.

For instance, Des Moines’ main hospitals are loosening their visitor policies and Tarrant County, Texas is closing six locations that have been administering the H1N1 vaccine because their health department says the number of people wanting the vaccine had dropped off.

At the end of January, the Council of Europe will be debating “Faked Pandemics: a threat to health”, and WHO officials have been asked to testify. Dr. Fukuda has denied that the WHO was influenced by the pharma industry in declaring a pandemic.

Health officials warn that a third wave of H1N1 is coming. If it does, the WHO is off the hook. If it doesn’t hit, I guess they’ve got a lot of explaining to do.

Tags: fake pandemic, H1N1, H1N1 flu, H1N1 Vaccine, pandemic
Posted in Drugs/Medical | 2 Comments »

H1N1 Vaccine-Gate

January 13th, 2010. By janem

“It’s one of the greatest medical scandals of the century” said Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, and it’s likely the costliest.  In France alone, health officials spent 1.25 billion dollars on 94 million doses of the H1N1 vaccine, but only 5 million has been used. Now, like other countries such as the UK and Germany, it is trying to sell off the supply. But the epidemic has already spiked so who wants to buy?

What I find most incredulous is how governments have been so freakin’ gullible! How could they get sucked in by big pharma companies such as Glaxo Smith Kline, Sanofi and Baxter—with their obvious financial interests at stake? Even Obama got sucked in. In October 2009, our president called H1N1 a national emergency and said there is  “rapid increase in illness from H1N1…the pandemic continues to evolve and rise rapidly…” But the numbers didn’t add up—you don’t call it a pandemic without doing some research.

These drug companies told everyone initially that two vaccines were needed, but later it was discovered that one shot is enough. So they doubled their money. And just to be on the safe side, that clever Glaxo Smith Kline sold governments a “no return” policy.

Health officials were led to believe that thousands upon thousands of people would die from H1N1 and in total, $20 billion was spent on the vaccine. But so far just 13,000 worldwide have died from the virus—definitely not the killer flu predicted. Besides, 250,000 people die of seasonal flu each year and Wodarg emphasizes this fact: “It’s [H1N1] just a normal kind of flu,” he said. “It does not cause a tenth of deaths caused by the classic seasonal flu.”

Some people (and not just conspiracy theorists) believe the swine flu outbreak was a ‘false pandemic’ driven by drug companies that stood to make billions of dollars from a worldwide scam. Wodarg is one of them, and he is backed by Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: H1N1, H1N1 flu, H1N1 Vaccine
Posted in Drugs/Medical | 1 Comment »

Vaccines: Just in Time for Big Pharma

January 1st, 2010. By janem

Big Pharma breathed a big sigh of relief when it realized vaccines can give a lot more bang for the buck than many “blockbuster” drugs. For pharmaceutical companies like Wyeth (now owned by Pfizer), Glaxo, Sanofi-Aventis and Novartis AG, pandemic flu threats–H1N1 in particular–couldn’t have come at a better time.

For instance, Wyeth’s pediatric pneumococcal vaccine Prevnar makes over $3 billion in annual sales–that should help cover product liability claims for its diet drug Fen-phen. (To date, the drug giant has set aside $21 billion to cover claims.)

And Merck & Co, already making shingles and cervical cancer vaccines, recently got into the US market via a deal to distribute seasonal flu vaccine made by Australia’s CSL Ltd, just in time to pay $4.85 billion in its Vioxx claims.

“Vaccines, vaccines, wonderful business,” quipped Chris Viehbacher, CEO of Sanofi-Aventis, which anticipates earnings of $6 billion in vaccine revenues this year and double its sales by 2013. In the last quarter of 2009, its H1N1 vaccines sales reached $500 million.

Novartis expected to generate $700m in fourth-quarter sales alone from its H1N1 vaccine, but GlaxoSmithKline is the main player in vaccines, holding 22 percent of the global market, and is set to cash in with Brazil, China and India as their burgeoning economies spell bigger budgets for healthcare spending. Glaxo is betting big time on the vaccine business: it just purchased a vaccine operation in Quebec for $1.4 billion, which may tighten the purse strings after paying almost $1billion to resolve lawsuits over its antidepressant Paxil.

Other big spenders are Abbott Laboratories ($6.6 billion on Belgian flu vaccine maker Solvay) and Johnson & Johnson (it just bought 18 percent of Dutch vaccine firm Crucell). “More companies are investing in vaccines as a way of diversifying away from prescription drugs,” says Michael Boyd of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations. “New technologies, such as cell culture, are enabling them to produce more sophisticated vaccines.”

With nearly 1 billion doses of H1N1 vaccine ordered in 2009, analysts predict the global vaccine industry will reach $40 billion by 2012: Cha ching. Perhaps this means we won’t see so many “blockbuster” new drugs entering the market in the next few years. After all, product liability litigation has been expensive.

Tags: Big Pharma, flu vaccine, H1N1, H1N1 flu, H1N1 Vaccine, vaccine
Posted in Drugs/Medical | 4 Comments »

Did Yasmin Clinical Trials Lack Female Researchers?

December 27th, 2009. By janem

Historically, clinical trials have studied more males than females, and researchers–for several reasons–test mostly or exclusively men. The Yasmin manufacturer says the effectiveness and safety of Yasmin was established in large-scale clinical trials: it involved 2,629 women. This number may seem substantial, but Viagra was given to over 3,000 men (of course) during its clinical trials and the statin Lipitor (prescribed for both sexes) involved 16,066 patients!

Biomedical scientists and researchers have preferred studying male subjects for a number of reasons including:

• The outdated belief that women were just little men and that the only difference was in reproductive organs;
• Perceived costs and complexity of recruitment and inclusion of women in clinical trials;
• The desire both to protect a woman’s potential fetus (regardless of whether she is pregnant, uses contraceptives, or intendsto conceive) and to avoid legal liability from prenatal exposure.
• The potentially confounding effects of women’s hormonal changes.

Clearly, a drug that is taken daily by millions of women-such as Yasmin and Yaz-needs more exhaustive clinical trials. Perhaps the (predominantly male) researchers are biased: they won’t ever take a birth control pill but they might use Viagra or a cholesterol-lowering drug like Lipitor or Crestor, the most widely prescribed medications in the world.

In the recently published book The Push to Prescribe, the authors make it clear that the under-representation–or even complete lack–of women in pharmaceutical research is one reason why women should research a drug such as Yasmin beforehand, even though they trust their doctors.

“Women are at the brunt of bad prescribing practices,” says Alan Cassels, a drug policy researcher. “Historically, it goes back to the birth control pill…Women are the leading consumers of health products, not just for themselves but for their husbands and kids as well.”

The Push to Prescribe also points out that adverse reactions to drugs are a major issue of particular interest to women. The number of people exposed to drugs is much more once it has been approved, meaning that experiences other than those observed in clinical trials are likely to occur after a drug is on the market.

Tags: Yasmin, yasmin clinical trials, Yaz
Posted in Drugs/Medical | No Comments »