Day: September 15, 2007

My friend Frank DeMarco posted an interesting article on his blog titled, News item from This is London, about a young Czech motorcycle rider that was knocked unconscious during a race, and for a while after coming to, spoke perfect English without an accent.

I don’t really know what to make of it, but it is certainly an interesting read.

The other day the Schwartz Report had a link to a story in the Wall Street Journal written by Jennifer Corbett Dooren, titled Study Shows Steep Rise In Adverse Drug Reactions. In the eight year period from 1998 to 2005 the number of serious drug side effects reported to the FDA more than doubled.

According to the story:

A serious adverse drug event, defined by the FDA, means an event that resulted in death, a birth defect, disability, hospitalization, was life-threatening or required medical intervention to prevent harm.

From 1998 to 2005, there were 467,809 serious adverse events reported. The annual number of reports rose from 34,966 in 1998 to 89,842 in 2005 [250% increase] while the number of fatal adverse drug events increased from 5,519 to 15,107 [274% increase] in the same time frame.

The study noted that, overall, the relative increase in serious reports was four times faster [400% increase] than the growth in total U.S. outpatient prescriptions, which grew in the same period from 2.7 billion to 3.8 billion [140% increase].

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