At least one child is seriously ill and dozens have suffered serious adverse reactions after receiving the free flu vaccine in Western Australia.

The Health Department has suspended the free flu vaccination program for children under five after a spike in admissions to Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH).

Health Minister Kim Hames says that in the past month, 45 otherwise healthy children have suffered fever, vomiting and febrile convulsions hours after receiving the vaccination.

Dr Hames says the program will be suspended until the department finishes an investigation.

The state's chief health officer, Tarun Weeramanthri, says the department is investigating whether the reactions were caused by a particular type of vaccine or batch.

"We are concerned that there's a much higher number of fever reactions than would be expected, and doctors at PMH have told us this," he said.

---------------------

West Australia's chief health officer says there are now 251 confirmed cases in the state of children aged under five having adverse reactions to flu vaccinations.

Last week the Health Department placed a temporary ban on flu shots for children under five after reports of children getting sick after being vaccinated.

The Department says 55 children have had convulsions after being vaccinated while nearly 200 others have suffered fever and vomiting.

One child is in a serious but stable condition at Princess Margaret Hospital.

Chief health officer Dr Tarun Weeramanthri says confirming the number of cases is a significant step forward in the search for the cause of the adverse reactions.

"We'll now be sharing that information with our colleagues from other states and territories. Once that national picture is built up this week we'll know more about whether there is a problem, which areas it is in, what possible causes there are," he said.

The Federal Government has been accused of making flawed decisions because of its overly "cosy" relationship with flu vaccine manufacturer CSL.

Health officials are investigating the death of a two-year-old girl and more than 250 reports of adverse reactions among children who have received the seasonal flu vaccine, and Australia's chief medical officer has issued a warning to doctors to stop using the CSL shots on the under-fives.

Now the vaccine manufacturer is facing claims it has undue influence over the Federal Government and that this "close relationship" has blocked the rollout and funding of more advanced flu vaccines on the Australian market.

Professor Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University is also the research director of rival vaccine manufacturer, Vaccine. He is calling for an independent inquiry into the Federal Government's relationship with CSL.

----------------------

Gus: now is this a relationship between the TGA and CSL or what? From what I can remember a few years ago, the federal government "does not pay" for the TGA. The TGA is funded by... phamarceuticals and agencies of interest...

Trio of scientists who urged stockpiling had previously been paid, says Council of Europe report bemoaning tentacles of drug company influence

Scientists who drew up the key World Health Organisation guidelines advising governments to stockpile drugs in the event of a flu pandemic had previously been paid by drug companies which stood to profit, according to a report out today.

An investigation by the British Medical Journal and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the not-for-profit reporting unit, shows that WHO guidance issued in 2004 was authored by three scientists who had previously received payment for other work from Roche, which makes Tamiflu, and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), manufacturer of Relenza.

City analysts say that pharmaceutical companies banked more than $7bn (£4.8bn) as governments stockpiled drugs. The issue of transparency has risen to the forefront of public health debate after dramatic predictions last year about a swine flu pandemic did not come true.

Some countries, notably Poland, declined to join the panic-buying of vaccines and antivirals triggered when the WHO declared the swine flu outbreak a pandemic a year ago this week. The UK, which warned that 65,000 could die as a result of the virus, spent an estimated £1bn stockpiling drugs and vaccines; officials are now attempting to unpick expensive drug contracts.

The cabinet office has launched an inquiry into the cost to the taxpayer of the panic-buying of drugs.

----------------

Female sexual dysfunction – which is claimed to affect up to two thirds of women – is a disorder invented by the pharmaceutical industry to build global markets for drugs to treat it, it is claimed today.

Drug companies have invested millions in the search for a female equivalent of Viagra, so far without success. But while doing so they have stoked demand by creating a buzz around the disorder they have created, according to Ray Moynihan, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

Corporate employees worked with medical opinion leaders, ran surveys aimed at portraying the problem as widespread and helped create the diagnostic instruments to persuade women that their sexual difficulties deserved a medical label. But sex problems in women are far more complex than they are in men, encompassing lack of desire, lack of arousal and lack of orgasm and the drug industry's narrow focus is failing them.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/female-sexual-dysfunction-was-invented-by-drugs-industry-2094578.html

see image at top

From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.

American tax dollars, through the National Institutes of Health, even paid for syphilis-infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, since Guatemalan prisons allowed such visits. When the prostitutes did not succeed in infecting the men, some prisoners had the bacteria poured onto scrapes made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture.

If the subjects contracted the disease, they were given antibiotics.

“However, whether everyone was then cured is not clear,” said Susan M. Reverby, the professor at Wellesley College who brought the experiments to light in a research paper that prompted American health officials to investigate.

The revelations were made public on Friday, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized to the government of Guatemala and the survivors and descendants of those infected. They called the experiments “clearly unethical.”

“Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health,” the secretaries said in a statement. “We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”

In a twist to the revelation, the public health doctor who led the experiment, John C. Cutler, would later have an important role in the Tuskegee study in which black American men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated for decades. Late in his own life, Dr. Cutler continued to defend the Tuskegee work.

His unpublished Guatemala work was unearthed recently in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh by Professor Reverby, a medical historian who has written two books about Tuskegee.

President Álvaro Colom of Guatemala, who first learned of the experiments on Thursday in a phone call from Mrs. Clinton, called them “hair-raising” and “crimes against humanity.” His government said it would cooperate with the American investigation and do its own.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

see stuff at top...

A SETTLEMENT, believed to be more than $50 million, has been reached in the Pan Pharmaceuticals class action against the federal government.

The settlement, announced yesterday, brings to a close a string of legal suits since 2003, and is belated vindication for the company's founder, Jim Selim, who died earlier this year after a stroke and battle with leukaemia.

Mr Selim had been giving evidence in the Federal Court in the months before his death. Terms of settlement are confidential.

...

In 2003, Pan boasted ''the largest product offering of its kind in the world'', with 4500 formulations of tablets, gels, liquids, creams and powders on offer, when it became the subject of a huge product recall.

In April that year the Therapeutic Goods Administration suspended Pan's manufacturing licence and recalled everything it had manufactured in the past year. Its investigation into Pan was sparked by reports the company's Travacalm product was causing hallucinations in some people. The company collapsed within months.

In 2008 Mr Selim received a $50 million settlement from the federal government.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/pan-legal-action-settled-for-50m-20101123-185qt.html

-------------------------

Gus: I do not know how old is the reporter who wrote this mistake-ridden story but I think he's blinded by something... First ask yourself the question: why would Mr Selim receive an AUD 50 million settlement from our government?... Hey? His firm bit the dust and... Hang on a minute. There were some shenanigans going on...

The TGA is a semi-public quango mostly (if not entirely) surviving by subscriptions from big Pharma... Can you smell the wind from here? Pan Pharmaceuticals was very successful and very CLEAN despite the rubbish that was fed by the TGA to the media. Sure Selim had had a few tifs with the TGA before, but his firm DID NOT COLLAPSE. IT WAS SHUT DOWN BY THE TGA for a minor problem — sort of problems that occur all the time in the "big pharma" industry. (The TGA had another pseudo-bif with another manufacturer soon after closing Pan down. I smell a rat as if the TGA was showing it was doing no-one any favours... You know what I mean)... That is why the government was legally forced to pay 50 million to Selim as a settlement. He could have refuse the offer and go on for the full cost... I think it was more than 350 millions but Selim was a reasonable bloke. He knew he was dying too...

This new payment mentioned in the SMH article is to compensate the firms that relied on Pan Pharmaceuticals for products. They were basically badly hit as well, as Pan Pharmaceutical was, for the PAN shut down IMPOSED BY THE TGA.

The government, led by Rattus then, did not see (did not want to see) that the TGA was acting very fiercefully and with no authority to do so (some people did suggest corruptly), especially in the light of stiff governmental negotiations with big pharmas for the supply of patent drugs... At the time, Pan Pharmaceuticals was able to produce cheap generic drugs, in AUSTRALIA. Now Pan Pharmaceutical produces the same cheap generic drugs in VIETNAM... (I believe there may have been some sabotage going on in Pan's factory in Australia in regard to Travacalm... but this is another story...)

The TGA acted like a little Hitler.  Who knows why?... One can ask the questions. I know the answers, but I won't tell you.

The world's biggest pharmaceutical company hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis, according to a leaked US embassy cable.

Pfizer was sued by the Nigerian state and federal authorities, who claimed that children were harmed by a new antibiotic, Trovan, during the trial, which took place in the middle of a meningitis epidemic of unprecedented scale in Kano in the north of Nigeria in 1996.

Last year, the company came to a tentative settlement with the Kano state government which was to cost it $75m.

But the cable suggests that the US drug giant did not want to pay out to settle the two cases – one civil and one criminal – brought by the Nigerian federal government.

The cable reports a meeting between Pfizer's country manager, Enrico Liggeri, and US officials at the Abuja embassy on 9 April 2009. It states: "According to Liggeri, Pfizer had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to federal attorney general Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases. He said Pfizer's investigators were passing this information to local media."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-cables-pfizer-nigeria

Gus: would the resignation of Pfizer CEO a couple of days ago have something to do with this wikileak? I wonder ... and thank you Wikileaks for leaking.