---or fuck you jack, I've got to suck off the investors, no matter how I have to poison the bystanders---

Factories dumping drugs into sewage
Samples taken contained opiates, a barbiturate and a tranquilizer
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Federal scientists testing for pharmaceuticals in water have been finding significantly more medicine residues in sewage downstream from public treatment facilities that handle waste from drugmakers.

Early results from two pivotal federal studies compare wastewater at treatment plants that handle sewage from drugmakers with those that do not. The studies cover just a small fraction of the 1,886 pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities counted in a 2006 U.S. Census report.

In one study, samples taken at two treatment plants down the sewer line from drugmaking factories contained a range of pharmaceuticals among them opiates, a barbiturate and a tranquilizer at "much higher detection frequencies and concentrations" than samples taken at other plants, according to preliminary research by the U.S. Geological Survey.
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One drug, the muscle relaxant metaxalone, was measured in treated sewage at concentrations hundreds of times higher than the level at which federal regulators can order a review of a drug's environmental impact.

Based on secrecy agreements with the researchers, the treatment plants were not identified.

USGS researcher Herb Buxton, who co-chairs a White House task force on pharmaceuticals in the environment, said it's important that federal scientists test the pharmaceutical industry's claims that their wastewater is not a meaningful source of pharmaceuticals in water.

"It's critical that those types of assumptions are confirmed through real testing," said Buxton.

In another study, Environmental Protection Agency researchers tested sewage at a municipal wastewater treatment plant in Kalamazoo, Mich., that serves a major Pfizer Inc. factory. Bruce Merchant, Kalamazoo's public services director, provided data that showed unusually high concentrations of the antibiotic lincomycin entering the plant, a drug the factory was producing around the time samples were collected.

"There's some product going down the drain," said Merchant.

While nearly all the lincomycin was removed during wastewater treatment, some did survive. According to a separate 2008 study, lincomycin combined in minute concentrations with several other drugs that also have been detected in surface water made human cancer and kidney cells and fish liver cells proliferate.

Biologist Francesco Pomati, at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, was so concerned with the findings that he and his colleagues warned that chronic exposure to the combination of drugs via drinking water could be "a potential hazard for particular human conditions, such as pregnancy or infancy."

In earlier experiments, lincomycin acted as a mutagen, changing genetic information in bacteria, algae, microscopic aquatic animals and fish.

Pfizer spokesman Rick Chambers said that while the company does not test wastewater from the facility for the drugs made on site, "compliance with all environmental, health and safety laws is imperative to our business operations worldwide."

The two domestic studies follow a burst of recent research in Asia and Europe that has started to link factories to the presence in water of drugs including the antibiotic sulfamethoxazole, the pain reliever diclofenac and the anticonvulsant carbamazepine, as well as an antihistamine, female sex hormones and aspirin.


Researchers in India, where multinational companies have increasingly turned for the manufacture of raw pharmaceutical ingredients, found that 100 pounds a day of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin enters a river from a wastewater treatment plant that processes sewage from dozens of pharmaceutical makers.

In Switzerland, a study sponsored by drugmaking giant Roche documented that 0.2 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients escape during its own processing. That kind of loss rate doesn't sound like a lot until it's projected out over the entire annual production of drugs worldwide. Studies in Taiwan and China also suggest drugmaking plants discharge product.

All of which raises questions about U.S. manufacturing.

"Is it as bad in the U.S. as it is in India? Probably not. But it does make me think we should test," said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA enforcement officer who is now an ecologist and environmental attorney.
© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

AlterNet
How Big Pharma Distorts Science to Get FDA Approval for Dangerous Drugs
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
Posted on April 20, 2009, Printed on April 20, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/137551/

In February the Justice Department charged Forest Laboratories with illegally marketing antidepressants Celexa and Lexapro to younger patients and burying a study that showed suicidal side effects in children. But the very next month the FDA approved Lexapro for depression in adolescents 12 to 17.

In March the Justice Department charged AstraZeneca with knowing and hiding the diabetes side effects of Seroquel. But this month the FDA considers expanding the antipsychotic's approvals to depression and anxiety.

And in January, Eli Lilly pled guilty to promoting its antipsychotic Zyprexa for unapproved and dangerous uses in a $1.4 billion settlement. But in March the FDA approved Lilly's Zyprexa/Prozac combo, Symbyax, for treatment resistant depression (TRD). What do you get when you cross Zyprexa with Prozac? Someone who gains 100 pounds and feels great about it!

"TRD" is such a new pharma invention that Googling it brings up Toyota Racing Development and Teacher Recruitment Days. But it will soon move prescriptions like GAD (general anxiety disorder), MDD (major depressive disorder) ADD (attention deficit disorder) RLS (restless legs syndrome) GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) and PMDD (Premenstrual dysphoric disorder) -- and for the same reasons.

How do dangerous drugs keep getting approved? Through the best articles and spokesmen money can buy.

Forest paid Massachusetts General Hospital researcher Jeffrey Bostic $750,000 to chat up Celexa and Lexapro, according to US District Court in Boston filings. AstraZeneca paid University of Minnesota researcher Charles Schulz $112,000 to push Seroquel, according to US District Court in Orlando filings. And a decade of pain "studies" conducted by Baystate Medical Center's Scott S. Reuben on Vioxx, Lyrica, Celebrex and Effexor were completely fabricated--including the patients say published reports.

And speaking of "made up," Coast IRB, an institutional review board which oversees some 300 clinical trials and 3,000 researchers, agreed last year to approve a human trial for "Adhesiabloc," a surgical gel that the Government Accountability Office completely made up in a sting operation. Oops.

And let's not forget Joseph your-child-is-bipolar Biederman, a Harvard physician who, according to the New York Times, assured benefactor Johnson & Johnson his studies would have favorable results for the drug Risperdal in advance of doing them. (Why leave things up to science?)

And Charles "Paxil" Nemeroff, MD who was forced to step down in December as psychiatry chairman at Emory University thanks to unreported GlaxoSmithKline income of up to $800,000.

And the pharma funded studies continue!

Last May a pro Lexapro article, "Escitalopram and Problem-Solving Therapy for Prevention of Poststroke Depression," ran in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, with no mention of financial ties author Robert G. Robinson has to Forest.

Why was, "a researcher with a history of being funded by SSRI makersgiven a forum in the national media to tell the general public that anyone who has had a stroke, whether or not they have been diagnosed with depression, should start a prophylactic regimen of Lexaproeven though non-medical approaches perform just as well," wrote Jonathan Leo, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroanatomy at Lincoln Memorial University in the British Medical Journal in March.

And then there's AstraZeneca.

AstraZeneca's best selling Seroquel -- it made $4.5 billion last year while only approved for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder -- is linked to high blood sugar, weight gain, diabetes, cholesterol and triglycerides abnormalities, sudden cardiac death, suicide, neuroleptic malignant syndrome and the tardive dyskinesia it is supposed to prevent.

But its "safety" was established by a different kind of chemistry.

Research director for Seroquel, Wayne MacFadden, was having affairs with two women responsible for Seroquel studies, according to court documents: one was a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and another a ghostwriter at Waltham, MA-based medical communications firm Parexel. In fact the studies upon which the FDA approved Seroquel for bipolar disorder-- called "Bolder" I and II -- were written by a ghostwriter.

Worse, sitting on the FDA's Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee at the time was Jorge Armenteros, MD, a paid AstraZeneca speaker according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Today he heads the committee.

Hopefully FDA will keep some Seroquel for itself.

Martha Rosenberg is a columnist and cartoonist who frequently writes about the impact of the pharmaceutical, food and gun industries on public health. A former medical copywriter, her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, as well as on the BBC and in the original National Lampoon.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:http://www.alternet.org/story/137551/


"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

  We get it general, you have a fixation.  With any luck, the lumber "capitalists" that built your house were downstream from a dreadfully unethical mound of termites.

gus.

 

So lying cheating stealing and dumping your harmful garbage onto your nextdoor neighbors is ok by you, el-gusbo if and only if some giant company is making money by doing so. I wager that I, an individual did any of those things to you, you would threaten to shoot me.

Better check your double standard schit head, I told you that your ilk hid behind the rubric of individual responsibility, you did not subscribe to it.

My house, by the way is doing fine. If you could see the picture I use for an icon, you'd see (if you knew anything about lumbering and rivers) that my great grandfather is holding a peavey while standing on a log raft.

Or to spell it out. My family knows lumber. As a mater of fact uncle Al owned the Carlton lumber company.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

So lying cheating stealing and dumping your harmful garbage onto your nextdoor neighbors is ok by you, el-gusbo if and only if some giant company is making money by doing so. I wager that I, an individual did any of those things to you, you would threaten to shoot me.

    Is that your opinion?  Because nothing I said would logically lead to it.  If so, shame on you, I thought you were a responsible citizen.  You lose general, I don't threaten to shoot anybody.  And I have to assume by now that your other "uncle Al" invented the Internet?

gus.

 

 

No no no gus, my uncle Al ran a lumber yard at the rail head in the county seat. The Al you refer to never ever claimed to have invented the equipment or software that the internet runs on. That is just another one of the lies you goobers believe in place of facing reality.

I'd test your assertion that you would not take steps to protect yourself, by flinging a little WP over your fence, or maybe some wafrin, I could just let toxic clouds of smoke drift over as I burned plastic. If its alla same to you. But on the other hand, I have a life here and bringing a cold bucket of reality to you is low on my life list.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

I'd test your assertion that you would not take steps to protect yourself, by flinging a little WP over your fence, or maybe some wafrin, I could just let toxic clouds of smoke drift over as I burned plastic. If its alla same to you. But on the other hand, I have a life here and bringing a cold bucket of reality to you is low on my life list.

   Oh zzzzzzz, general.  Unless you're going to post a pic of you in your peacock suit, it's all a waste of time!  Save it for your neighbors, God bless their souls...

gus.

 

 

Oh, I don't know gus, I get you to admit to a little bit of sense every once in awhile. The dissonance will get you and you'll realize that with just a little tweak, you are a classic liberal.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

One can easily understand why capitalists are the only dishonest. immoral, lying people in the entire world.

For example there are no Gays in Iran. Why, The kill them. There are no thieves, why, they cut their hands off. Ant there was that wonderful Soviet Union in which crimes were commtted once. Guess what happened then.
J2's problem is that the grass looks greener because he feels secure with the givermebnt provding his needs.

Recall what Ben Franklin said about freedom and security. Obviously J2 prefers the security of a slave.

once again you puling pile of pig shit named potese, you are as wrong as it is possible for a pseudo person to be. I refuse to be a slave to money and those who commit evil in amassing money. The fact that you make money does not make you moral and a corporation, like the persons in it, must be held responsible for the harm it does, just as private persons are.

The law must apply to all and not kowtow to the rich or the famous.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.