Tag Archives: Seroquel

Antipsychotic Drug Seroquel— Diabetes Lawsuits Hurt AstraZeneca Profits

Among Seroquel side effects is a reported increased risk of Seroquel diabetes. According to the UK Press Association, AstraZeneca set aside $203 million to resolve approximately 18,000 claims in the US that Seroquel, a schizophrenia treatment, caused diabetes and other serious Seroquel side effects. A further $270 million was reportedly put aside for other claims and to cover AstraZeneca’s legal costs. In August 2010, AstraZeneca said it settled approximately 17,500 lawsuits alleging Seroquel caused diabetes and other injuries for approximately $200 million. The lawsuits alleged the drug maker failed to adequately warn patients about the drugs’ risks.

Johnny Got His Pills

The military-pharmaceutical complex is making a killing or, more specifically, making a fortune off the folks we’ve asked to do the killing — and off the rest of us. They dope our unruly kids, they dope the young men and women fighting in and returning home from the war, and they dope the rest of us right here at home for being sick of wars overseas and fearful of war on the middle and lower classes and dreading the reckonings to come and being ashamed of our own sad national shadow.

Top prescribers under Senate’s microscope

Minnesota doctors are again under the microscope of an influential U.S. senator from Iowa — this time because of concerns that expensive medications are being overprescribed at great cost to the publicly funded Medicaid and Medicare programs. U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, notified federal authorities Wednesday that he found potential examples of overprescribing after requesting lists from states, including Minnesota, of doctors who issued the most prescriptions for antipsychotic and narcotic medications in 2008 and 2009.

When Big Pharma Breaks the Law—Prosecute the CEO

Since 2004, pharma has paid over $7 billion in fines and penalties, but even these figures barely dent profits. The $2.3 billion fine Pfizer paid in September 2009 for the way one of its subsidiaries marketed Bextra, the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, and three other drugs, was the biggest ever paid by a corporation in the US. Yet the fine was just 14 per cent of $16.8 billion revenue from the drugs from 2001 to 2008, little more than the price of doing business.