Prescription & OTC drug reactions triple in U.S.

Uh oh... if you believe the latest reports, the FDA is in the hot seat as prescription and over-the-counter drug side effects and deaths have tripled since 1998:

The number of deaths and serious injuries from prescription and over-the-counter drugs climbed from 34,966 to 89,842 during the study of reports to the Food and Drug Administration.

Potent narcotic painkillers including Oxycontin, sold generically as oxycodone, were among 15 drugs most often linked with deaths in the study. Drugs frequently linked with serious nonfatal complications included insulin, the arthritis drugs Vioxx and Remicade, and the antidepressant Paxil.

Naturally the FDA would like us to believe that the increase is primarily due to improved reporting of these types of incidents. However:

When commenting on the study’s findings, the FDA tried to blame a new system that makes it easier to report drug side effects as the reason for the nearly three-fold increase. But the report’s authors, while conceding that the new reporting system did account for some of the increase, said that it could not be blamed for such high numbers. Rather, the researchers said that findings showing that a small minority of medications were responsible for a majority of adverse event reports suggested problems in the way high-risk drugs are monitored for safety. Drugs like fentanyl and oxycodone – both highly addictive narcotic pain killers – probably deserve more scrutiny than other medications. And the fact that a drug like insulin was high on the list of drugs responsible for side effect reports indicates that health care providers might be ill-equipped to manage some medications, as problems with insulin are usually the result of poor management.

Nobody ever said the FDA had it easy...