A book highlighting the goings on in the world of pharmaceutical industry has caused an information earthquake in all the continents.
This is the first of its kind effort by a celebrated investigative journalist to enter the secret chambers of the world’s pharma companies hitherto accessible only to a select few anywhere in the universe.
When we switch on the TV news channels, the report that welcome us to yet another day is about the fresh cases of coronavirus related pandemic and the increasing number of causalities. To spice up the reports, there are news items about the mad rush by medical researchers to find out a vaccine which they claim could annihilate the virus causing covid 19.
“It is not because of their love for humanity that they work overtime to come out with this so called medicine. It’s the amount of money involved in it,” said Prof BM Hegde , renowned cardiologist and medical scientist whom the nation had honoured with Padma Bhushan.
The contention of Prof Hegde has been proved to the dot by Gerald Posner, the attorney turned investigative journalist who in the past had shocked the world with details about the not so sacred history of money and power at the Vaticam through his work “God’s Bankers”.
This time, the young attorney chose yet another less travelled route filled with all kind of dangerous trenches and death traps set by a cabal of greedy industrialists and brought out the happenings in the corporate war rooms and laboratories of pharma giants manufacturing medicines and drugs for diseases which too are of their contribution. The book Pharma that has hit the shelves across USA early March and is expected to reach Indian book stores is an account of “Greed, Lies and Poisoning of America”, according to Jordan Rodman, spokesperson, Simon & Schuster, the publishers.
“Posner brings to life the heroes and villains of the pharmaceutical industry and reveals how a business meant to save lives is steeped in corruption and reckless profiteering—with deadly consequences,” said Rodman.
The 817 page book features how pharmaceutical companies hid the safety risks of estrogen replacement and early contraceptive pills, both with levels of hormones up to 10 times greater than necessary; the result was significantly higher cancer rates among the millions of female patients.
Posner also reveals how a couple of drug companies secretly funded a doctor responsible for a revolution in marketing estrogen drugs to women as the pharmaceutical solution to staying “feminine forever”, and discloses how that doctor and the pharma firms hid news of his wife’s fatal estrogen-linked breast cancer.
The book has to be read in the backdrop of findings by the medical warriors of India, Prof B M Hedge and Dr C V Krishnaswami that Adverse Drug Reaction and over medication constituted the third cause for number of deaths in USA, the other being heart attacks and cancer. Dr Hegde quotes from a study undertaken by the Institute of Medicine in the US which found that doctors and hospitals are the third most important cause of death with only heart attacks and cancers preceding doctors in that order of importance.