Auditor General: Health Canada Sucks at Issuing Drug Safety Warnings
Health Canada is terrible at alerting consumers to safety issues it identifies with drugs, according to the Auditor General.
The time lag, outlined in an audit tabled Tuesday in the House of Commons and characterized as "serious," means people sometimes have to wait more than two years before Health Canada completes a drug safety review of a product already on the market and provides updated information about their risks.
In other news, I heard on the radio this morning that despite bovine grown hormone causing birth defects, altering the final milk product (unfavourably for humans) and a bunch of other horrible shit it took two of the Canadian government scientists looking at it to lose their jobs and take ten years out of their lives fighting over this to get anyone to pay attention. Although Similac (et al) were never approved in Canada, other hormones with similar problems were. They still aren't banned here (as they are in the EU) and are still being used in the States.
The scientists in question were under heavy pressure from the Prime Minister's Office (Cretien at the time) to "just approve" the drugs and hormones, were offered $2 million bribes from Monsanto and other obviously-wrong things. So much for transparency. And Harper's campaign promise of helping whistle-blowers? Farts in the wind, apparently, since these two are still out of their jobs. They both claim it's actually gotten worse under Harper.
Most of the data showing that this shit was totally worthless crap was from Monsanto's own research -- which of course they ignored. What if actually-objective scientists did some looking?
More cbc, morecbc, OrganicConsumers.org, EnvironmentalHealth.ca.