Animal Writings

The latest issue of Animal People reports some incriminating facts about Wyeth, the company that manufactures and sells Prempro. Prempro is an estrogen supplement that is made from collecting pregnant mares' urine. According to Animal People, "Prempro is the most recent popular drug based on Premarin, the longtime top-selling estrogen supplement." The processing of this class of drugs requires impregnating large numbers of mares each year and confining them in stalls, which severely restricts their opportunities for exercise, movement, and normal socialization. The "excess" foals are slaughtered when quite young (less than a year old).

Animal People reports, first of all, that according to the Women's Health Initiative Study, women taking Prempro double their risk of breast cancer. A previous study by the same group showed a 26% breast cancer risk increase for women taking the drug. But the new study more accurately reflects the cumulative effect.

The paper also reports that Wyeth hired ghostwriters to submit articles in medical and scientific journals that Wyeth itself had written and that were—of course—favorable to the company. This level of hubris, greed, dishonesty, and callousness is disgusting. Although, as we're seeing with executives taking taxpayer bailout money and spending it on lavish parties and vacations, and as we've witnessed in one scandal after another going back decades, even centuries, monstrous levels of greed in corporations is nothing new. It's frighteningly commonplace. It becomes so dominating that it pushes out feelings of common decency, of humility and honesty, of connection and empathy for fellow beings—human or nonhuman. Perhaps in our society one should suspect, uunless it is proven otherwise, that top executives of large corporations got there by being selfish, greedy, self-centered, ruthless SOBs. That seems to be the system that perpetuates at those ranks.

Here we have a situation where a giant company in one of the most profitable sectors of the U.S. economy is intentionally lying so that it can increase profits at the expense of giving unsuspecting women breast cancer. If drug companies treat humans with such utter contempt, one can only imagine how much they care about the animals used in their drug tests.

You may have read in the last few years, from sources such as the Wall Street Journal and the New England Journal of Medicine, about the alarming level of corruption and collusion in clinical trials: undisclosed financial relationships between researchers and study funders, study publishers intentionally omitting data that would clash with financial goals, and so forth. If they're this fast and loose with data from clinical trials with human volunteers, imagine how they must manipulate data from already-dubious and easier to contrive animal studies...

OK, the next post will offer a ray of optimism.

Labels: breast cancer, cancer, corporate greed, drug development, drugs, estrogen supplements, Premarin, Prempro