Spring Talks Sex

In 2000, 15-year-old Vanessa Young’s doctor prescribed Prepulsid for her stomach ailment. The drug was presented as safe by both Vanessa’s doctor and the manufacturer. Shortly after taking it, she died. Shattered by grief and anger, Terence Young began a long fight to find out why. This fight became a larger one, as Young determined to battle the industry to make sure this kind of tragedy never happened again. The truth, as he would discover, is that every year thousands of people die as a result of complications from prescription drugs. And most of the companies that manufacture these drugs simply don’t care. Death by Prescription is the story of a father's fight to find justice for his dead daughter, and a wake-up call to the millions of innocent people who are potential victims of pharmaceutical companies that put profits ahead of patients.

Examines how pharmaceutical companies promoted hormone therapy drugs, including the use of medical writing companies to produce ghostwritten manuscripts and place them into medical journals.

Finds that testing for safety and effectiveness of prescrption drugs in Canada takes place almost exclusively before medications are approved and that there are “few regulatory obligations once a product reaches the market.”Assesses the Canadian post-market systems of drug surveillance -  “pharmacovigilance” - and finds that there is no national system to test drugs for safety after they reach the market.

A study by researchers at the UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research that concluded that the practice of sex- and gender-based analysis has still not been “internalized” or “mainstreamed by the community of pharmaceutical policy researchers. The author’s state that “increased application of SGBA is, in most cases, not only appropriate for the topics under investigation, but well within the reach of today's pharmaceutical policy researchers.”

One of the series of Mythbusters information sheets that examines drug safety issues. Discusses the safety of pharmaceutical drugs after they have been approved and how drug approval does not necessarily mean a drug is fully tested or that it's effects are fully understood. Points to the need for consumers to thoroughly understand the potential benefits and harms of any drug so that they make make informed decisions about drugs they may take. Approves of the establishment of the federally-funded Drug Safety and Effectiveness Network, which will fund research on the safety and effectiveness of drugs in the “real world”.

Mythbusters is a series of two-page articles that summarize the best available evidence to challenge widely held beliefs about issues in Canadian healthcare.

A collection of information and advice gathered at the policy symposium "Safe and sound: optimizing prescribing behaviours" held in Montreal in 2007 to assist in the continued development of Canada’s National Pharmaceuticals Strategy (NPS).