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Adverse Drug
Reactions Kill 106,000 Annually!
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Drug
Death Toll Due to Known Side-Effects!
Data
from U.S. hospital records show that 2,216,000
hospitalized patients had serious Adverse Drug
Reactions (ADRs) and 106,000 died, making these
ADRs the fourth leading cause of death.
To
estimate the incidence of serious and fatal adverse
drug reactions (ADR) in U.S. hospital patients,
four electronic databases were searched from 1966
to 1996. The researchers excluded errors in drug
administration, noncompliance, overdose, drug
abuse, therapeutic failures, and possible ADRs.
Serious ADRs were defined as those that required
hospitalization, were permanently disabling, or
resulted in death.
These
2.2 million ADRs and 106,000 fatalities were all
determined to be due to known side effects of
the drugs. The researchers who analyzed the data
from U.S. hospital records were careful to exclude
errors in giving the wrong drug, cases of drug
overdose, drug abuse, not taking the right drug,
therapeutic failures, and possible ADRs.
These
astounding numbers of ADRs and fatalities were
all confirmed, which leads us to assume that there
was an even larger number of suspected ADR’s
that could not be confirmed and thus were not
reported.
Consumers
must ask their doctors about drug side effects.
The FDA should require mandatory dispensing of
complete drug information in terms the lay public
can understand and require WARNING LABELS on all
drugs that have been associated with serious or
fatal ADRs.
The
current FDA requirement that drug companies publish
the pharmaceutical / physician drug information
with any advertised drug is Latin to everyone
else. It appears that the pharmaceutical companies
do it intentionally to prevent the public from
discovering the real truth about the lack of known
actions of the drugs as well as their side effects.
The data is their, its just buried in thousands
of words of medical jargon that’s too technical
and too tiny for any one to read but a scientist
with very thick glasses or a microscope.
SOURCE: JAMA (Journal
of the American Medical Association) 1998 Apr
15;279(15):1200-1205
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