by Linda Burleson

Created on: July 21, 2008   Last Updated: July 28, 2008

There is a great deal of intrigue among pharmaceutical companies. Like it or not, this is big business with untold dollars at stake. Whether we are talking cancer treatment or new chemical weaponry or antidotes, there is strong competition. Often, negative findings are buried in so much paperwork and scientific language, that if the reports were published, only the most knowledgable would have a clue what they were reading.

It is a given that a company with limited progress in any area does not want documentation until they can actually put a product on the market. Corporate espionage is so rampant in the pharmaceutical industry and in the scientific community that prize winning authors build suspense novels around it.

The government most certainly has a role in making sure the products on the market are safe for use. Reports need to be concise and in a language the public can understand, physicians in particular. Citizens take the word of the FDA that a product is safe; they trust their physicians to prescribe drugs that will help rather than harm, yet when products are put on the market without the proper study time and accurate data, we have a crisis like the Thalydomide crisis where infants were born deformed, limbless and with any number of catastrophic maladies. Women do not care for morning sickness, but had they been given the potential for the possible results from taking this drug, they would have, to the very last one I'm sure, opted for the morning sickness. Doctors prescribed this to their patients unaware of what could happen. How can this be? My assertion is that somewhere, somehow this drug got approved by the FDA and put on the market without proper documentation of data for profit - big profit. Whether we are talking insecticides, petroleum products, non-fossil fuels, effects of nuclear power, chemical poisoning, or drug side effects, we have the right to know and to determine how much we are willing to risk to utilize the products.

The average citizen has no means by which to find any information out about scientific progress if the government does not have the integrity to require honesty in reporting data, and enforcing this with rigid penalties if the parties that be do not do so.

Certainly these companies and industries put findings out that are available in pubic domain, but there has been incomplete data in the documents. Government control of industry is not a positive thing, but science has progressed to the point that companies are competing to see who can clone, who can heal cancer and other diseases through use of the human stem cells, who can find antidotes for chemical poisoning in the case of chemical warfare, and who really knows what else. There carries with this the possibility of garnering millions, even billions of dollars. This makes for an industry ripe for corruption. These must be controlled and supervised, and yes, made public, particularly in the case of federally funded projects. Just whose are these federal dollars? Ours!

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