Avandia – A Risk Worth Taking?

The panorama broadcast of 6/Sept/10 reported how the Heart attack side effects of the drug Avandia , far outweigh its benefits to diabetes sufferers.
The program also reported how GlaxoSmithKline controlled and manipulated the “clinical trials” to get “better results”.
It also reported the closed practises of the BMA-British Medical Association ( a kind of doctors trade union) who operate in the interests of the drug companies and not the patients.

I have worked in elderly care homes and seen the vast number of unnecessary drugs given to elderly and sectioned residents.
In the interests of saving lives and not wasting money there are some measures the government can take.

1. As done in the USA, all pharmaceutical companies must publish how much they have paid to each UK doctor for selling their drugs.
2. There needs to be a independent British or EU organization which can heavily fine these drug companies.

Bill Gates now pushing drugs

Reuters 19/07/2010

Bill Gates urged AIDS activists on Monday to squeeze value out of every cent of funds to fight HIV, saying they could not expect donors to give more in hard times unless it was carefully spent.

Addressing 20,000 AIDS scientists, health workers and activists at an international conference in Vienna, the former U.S. President and the Microsoft founder said efficiency savings were vital in delivering HIV/AIDS prevention services and treatment to the countries hardest hit and at highest risk.

“The world is awash in troubles. It is easy to rail at a government and say … give us more money. But we also have to change the way we do what we do,” Clinton told the conference.

“If we’re going to make this case, they (donor governments) have to believe that we are doing our job faster, better and cheaper. Then we have the moral standing to go ask people to give us more money.”

Gates, a philanthropist whose Gates Foundation spends a large portion of its $34 billion fund on fighting AIDS, said efficiency was vital to be able to scale up access to AIDS drugs for the 15 million people who need them.

“We can’t keep spending AIDS resources in exactly the same way we do today,” he said. “As we … advocate for more funding, we also need to make sure we’re getting the most benefit from each dollar of AIDS funding and every ounce of effort.”

The head of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria says it needs $20 billion in the next three years to sustain progress in tackling the diseases.

Out of the 33.4 million people who are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus HIV that causes AIDS, 5.2 million now get the drugs they need. But non-drug-related costs of treatment, such as hospital costs, labs, testing and monitoring, are more than twice the cost of the medicines.

Gates called for rapid scale-up of “cheap, effective, and easy to apply” HIV/AIDS prevention measures — such as male circumcision and prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV — which he said were so cost-effective “that in endemic countries it is more expensive not to pursue them.”

Yet in the case of male circumcision, while more than 41 million men in sub-Saharan Africa could benefit from it, only 150,000 have been circumcised in the past few years, Gates said.

Both Gates and Clinton also cited new studies showing that treating HIV patients with cocktails of AIDS drugs can dramatically reduce transmission of the virus to others.

Clinton’s whose William Clinton Foundation also works in the fight against AIDS, warned activists not to battle with President Barack Obama’s administration or other governments who he said were essentially on their side.

Hundreds of protestors marched through the Vienna conference on its opening day on Sunday to demonstrate against a pullback of funding for AIDS in the wake of a global recession.

Clinton said the campaigners should recognize Obama as their friend, and seek to work with him not against him.

“You have two options here, you can demonstrate and call the president names, or we can go get some more votes in (the U.S.) Congress to get some more money,” Clinton said. “My experience is that the second choice is a better one and far likelier to pay off. There is no way the White House will veto an increase in funding for AIDS.”

Remember the Dead Swan of Dundee

Remember the hoax dead swan in Dundee 2006. The circling helicopters, the wall to wall news coverage, the scientists and politicians all in a flap! This is what happens when £Billions are wasted on Swine flu (H1N1), bird flu (h5N1) and any other pandemic they might invent and sell to the world!

Far too much tax payer money was wasted on these exaggerated and flawed pandemic alerts. I am sure that the quangos concerned such as the Health Protection Agency will hope that the huge billion plus expenditure is now forgotten. They will also claim to have made their own enquiries and conclusions. However the public do need to bring them to account as to why the mistakes were made and how we can be sure they will not continue making them.

In March 2009 the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Advisory Committee (SPI) Previously: Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) advised to the government that in the UK alone a pandemic could affect up to 50% of the population and cause between 50,000 and 750,000 deaths. Why was so many of the committee members made up from people like Dr Alison Webster from GlaxoSmithKline who had vested interests for mass vaccinations and stock piling of antiviral drugs like Tamiflu.

The wider concern here is that just like the global warming industry (were there might be some truth), there is a £billion pandemic industry now feeding upon itself to justify more and more scientic reasons to market their own professions. And of course the news medias are equally quick to exploit public fears as they know in Dundee.