Campaigners Congratulate Diane
Patient safety group Safer Medicines Campaign thanks Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP Diane Abbott for signing Early Day Motion 569 "Safety of Medicines" to improve the safety testing of new drugs. Side effects of prescription medicines hospitalise one million Britons and kill more than 10,000 every year, making them one of our leading causes of death.
Better methods to test the safety of new drugs could have a major impact. Current methods rely on animal tests, which sometimes create a false sense of security, as in the "elephant man" clinical trial at Northwick Park Hospital in 2006, where the drug had been approved by tests in monkeys at 500 times the dose that proved almost fatal in the young men.
New safety tests, using state of the art techniques on human tissues and in ultra low dose studies in volunteers, promise to give results more predictive for humans. But these tests are not yet required by law.
Kathy Archibald, Director of Safer Medicines Campaign, says: "It is time to compare these new tests with the animal tests currently required by law. Technologies to predict safety in humans have leapt ahead in the past ten years but our regulations are stuck in the past. These new technologies must be embraced to reduce the tragic toll of adverse drug reactions. We congratulate Ms Abbott for taking a lead in modernising our outdated regulatory system."
Says Ms Abbott : "Too many people are being harmed by their medicines, whose safety must be improved. If superior tests are available, the law should require them and I will do everything I can to support the Safety of Medicines (Evaluation) Bill, which I am proud to support through EDM 569. We must move safety testing into the twenty-first century, for all our sakes."
ENDS
For further infomation please contact Safer Medicines Campaign: 01728 451436 / 07792 289066 / kathy@safermedicines.org
For information on the Safety of Medicines (Evaluation) Bill 2009 and Early Day Motion 569 see http://www.safermedicines.org/safetyofmedicines/infosheet.pdf.
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