Quote:
Originally Posted by PaulS
That cuts both ways. Certainly some drugs are available quick elsewhere but then you have Thalidomide (in the 60s?) which I believe never got approved here. If you go to Europe you see still people with flippers rather than limbs.
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The people in Europe with the flippers are those whose malformation occurred 40 to 50 years ago. The European regulatory agencies have long ago restricted the use of thalidomide. The FDA makes mistakes too, from which it has to reverse past decisions. And thalidomide does have medicinal use in fighting certain diseases. In 2006 thalidomide was approved by the FDA for treatment of multiple myeloma.
The EU is far more efficient in bringing new drugs to market than is the FDA. Mostly because it has more rational approach to regulating the production and delivery to market of those drugs. It is also more positive to the approval and delivery of herbal remedies than here because they don't allow pressure from pharmaceutical companies to suppress herbal cures.
The trade-off between presumed safety by extremely costly, time consuming FDA regulatory requirements and the lives lost by too slow delivery of useful drugs to market is fostered more by political agendas rather than by necessary overregulation for safety. Please read the following article that rationally discusses the tradeoff and why the costs could go down considerably if regulations were reasonable rather than draconian.
http://cei.org/op-eds-articles/drug-...-deadly-delays