There's no question that prescribed medicines have a positive change with so many individuals day-to-day lives. These kinds of prescription drugs move through a fairly extensive testing and safe practices methodologies before they come for prescription. Not so many prescription drugs make it through this process with most failing after which they are abandoned by the drug organization. The high standard mandatory before drugs may be authorized for the market come about as a result of tighter standards due to earlier problems, a number of them being fairly spectacular. The most renowned of such failures is probably the thalidomide debacle.
Thalidomide was initially marketed in 1957 in Germany to take care of stress and anxiety, sleeping conditions and also morning sickness. The thalidomide turned out to be valuable with the morning illness while pregnant and it was speedily approved in forty six countries to be used by women that were currently pregnant. It was not approved for use and distribution in the USA, in which it had been rejected by the Food and Drug Administration for not achieving high enough standards. Thalidomide was never analyzed to see if it was safe while being pregnant. The outcome the drugs use in pregnancy was an estimated more than 10 000 babies being born having a variety of serious limb deformities and many more miscarriages. With the live births approximately half died within weeks of being given birth to. This is probably the most significant scandal from the history of the prescription drug market.
The problems with thalidomide ended up first noticed in 1961 by the doctor, William McBride, that wrote correspondence in the Lancet medical journal about their findings of seeing an increase in the number of deformed infants which were born at his hospital, all of whom mothers were using the drug. At about the same time, the paediatrician Widukind Lenz in Germany likewise noted several comparable instances where the medication was still being sold over-the-counter and not simply on prescription. This brought about an investigation and subsequent prohibiting of the medication from being used. In 1968, the West German organization that made thalidomide, Chemie Grünenthal GmbH ended up being put on trial in Germany with the company negotiating the case out of court with no court case going ahead. As a result of this German affected individuals have been remunerated. Not one person from the company was found responsible for any crimes. In the United Kingdom, the victims of the drug had been also compensated by the United Kingdom distributors of the drug. In other countries there have been quite a few class actions sought, resulting in pay outs decades after the thalidomide ceased to be marketed.
The actual publicity around this and the birth defects which occurred from thalidomide cast a dark shadow over the pharmaceutical drug sector. The resulting controversy led to every single country to create more effective programs for medication regulation and monitoring following the authorization of drugs. This was particularly the case in the terms of the use of drugs while pregnant in which the standards and prerequisites are now quite high.
Thalidomide as a drug nevertheless does possess some uses for treatments for some cancers and a few inflammatory diseases. It's being used as a drug for leprosy and also multiple myeloma.
