The side effects of drugs cause at least 18,000 deaths each year in France, indicates Dr. Bernard Bégaud, heard as a witness in the Mediator trial.
The testimony of Professor Bernard Begaud at the Mediator trial was eagerly awaited. Following this affair and that of new generation pills, this pharmacologist was entrusted with a mission aimed at developing a pharmacosurveillance system for prescriptions. “Each year there are 18,000 deaths directly linked to taking medication,” the pharmacologist, head of an Inserm unit, immediately indicated. And even if many cases are inevitable, a third of these deaths correspond to prescriptions which are not justified ”, he recalled in front of the court of Nanterre. That’s more than the number of road deaths and suicides combined.
President of the National Pharmacovigilance Commission from 1982 to 2000, Professor Bégaud also underlined that “85% of alerts on the adverse effects of a drug come from hospitals and only 15% from private doctors”, because “those – they are poorly trained in pharmacology, ”he lamented.
And the doctor is outraged by declaring that “to die for a product which you do not need is something very serious”. The Mediator, was indeed originally an anti-diabetic, which has been widely used as an appetite suppressant and prescribed in many cases to patients who only wanted to lose a few pounds. Five million people would have consumed it before it was withdrawn from the market in 2009, accused of causing pulmonary arterial hypertension, an incurable pathology, and valve disease (dysfunction of the heart valves).
The Mediator trial targeting Jacques Servier, 91, the founder of the group, and four executives from Servier and Biopharma, one of the laboratories’ subsidiaries, should last until June 14. The defendants are tried for “aggravated deception”.
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