A European drugs watchdog is holding a special meeting to review the safety of Avandia, a widely-used diabetes drug, amid calls for it to be withdrawn because of concerns about heart risks.The European Medicines Agency EMA met in London, the British capital, on Wednesday, two days after UK drug regulators called for product to be pulled from the market.

via Diabetes drug comes under scrutiny – Europe – Al Jazeera English.

It should not be on the market anywhere in the world sadly. Once again the EU does a better job at regulating than the US and its corpocracy.

Here’s another story of a corrupt pharmaceutical corporation who will release drugs to the public regardless of whether it is safe or not. The NY Times obtained an internal FDA report which brought these issues to light.

Hundreds of people taking Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, needlessly suffer heart attacks and heart failure each month, according to confidential government reports that recommend the drug be removed from the market.

I’m telling you people should get the pitch forks and torches and start driving Big Pharma out of the United States. First Vioxx and now Avandia.

May 21 (Bloomberg) — GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s drug Avandia, the world’s top-selling oral diabetes treatment, may raise a patient’s chance of having a heart attack, researchers said. Glaxo shares fell the most in five years.

Patients getting Avandia were 43 percent more likely to have a heart attack, according to an analysis released today of previous studies. Researchers also found a trend toward high death rates. Glaxo executives said more rigorous research showed no increase in danger, and U.S. regulators said they don’t yet have enough information to determine any risks.

GlaxoSmithKline: An Un-American, unethical, and anti-human pharmaceutical corporation. But then again most of the corporations that make up Big Pharma are the same things. Absolutely sickening and disgusting.

Update – 11/3/2011

This post was my first post written in 2007 about Avandia. Over the years I wrote more about that drug  here. Now after all this time there has finally been a muli-billion dollar settlement.

GlaxoSmithKline Plc agreed to pay $3 billion to resolve U.S. criminal and civil investigations into whether the U.K. company marketed drugs for unapproved uses and other matters, its biggest legal settlement.

Back then in 2007 a study that Bloomberg News had cited said that the findings weren’t definitive. Well, I guess we’re pretty sure about them now in the year 2011.