Thalidomide - The Story You Don't Know (Part One) - What Your GP Doesn't Tell You Podcast
Journalist Jennifer Vanderbes reveals the details of a forensic six year investigation
The latest episode of the What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You Podcast - Thalidomide - The Story You Don’t Know (Part One) is now available on Apple, Spotify and other podcast platforms. And you can sign up to the podcast mailing list at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You, where you can also find out more about the pod. The next episode of the podcast will go out on Tuesday 28th November.
This week, I am talking to journalist Jennifer Vanderbes, whose detailed and complex research into thalidomide - one of the biggest medical failures in history - has resulted in a new book Wonder Drug - The Hidden Victims of America’s Secret Thalidomide Scandal.
Today, the drug is thought to have been responsible for around 100,000 miscarriages and deaths. It causes a range of devastating disabilities including a shortening or absence of limbs; hands and feet that are not fully formed; and damage to ears, eyes, the brain, skeleton and internal organs.
For the very first time, Vanderbes has uncovered critically important new information about the drug, including warnings that went unheeded; tests that were misrepresented; and in the process, has discovered scores of potential victims of the drug who have never been recognised before.
The first country to put thalidomide on the market was Germany in 1957. Produced by the company, Chemi Grunenthal, it was in the marketeers’ words “astonishingly safe”. But what few knew at the time, was that even during early testing, many doctors were unconvinced by the drug.
A year before thalidomide went on the market, the wife of a Grunenthal employee, who had been taking the drug during pregnancy, gave birth to a baby girl born without ears. But the tragedy was that no one connected the baby’s disabilities with the medication. And two years later, with the help of Grunenthal’s UK partner, Distillers Biochemicals, thalidomide was approved for use in the UK. Meanwhile in the states, an American company, Merrell was lobbying to get the drug approved by the FDA.
With thalidomide already approved for use in Germany and the UK, Merrell, who had signed a contract with Grunenthal to become its US partner, hoped that they too would also be able to get the drug onto the market quickly.
They anticipated that their application to the FDA would progress quickly, but they hadn’t allowed for the dogged commitment of one particularly conscientious reviewer, Dr Frances Kelsey, who was deeply concerned by the lack of evidence she was looking at:
Merrell’s application told Kelsey that a small number of doctors in the states were testing the drug in clinical trials, but the company omitted a crucially important piece of information. What they didn’t tell her, was that they had actually sent out thalidomide to a far larger group of doctors.
It turns out to have been given to many American patients, who frequently received the drug in a brown envelope or unmarked bottle, so they had no idea about what medication they had been given.
Due to Kelsey’s continued insistence that she needed thorough data before the drug could be approved - information she never received. Thalidomide was never approved for use in the US. However, as Vanderbes has uncovered, due to the doctors that Merrill used widely dispensing the drug, it means as she discusses in part two of the podcast, there were also scores of American children damaged by thalidomide.
By 1961, four years since the drug first appeared on the market, an increasing number of doctors were reporting genuine concerns about it. Two who were particularly key to the story were an Australian obstetrician Dr William Mc Bride, and a Germany geneticist Dr Widukind Lenz.
Lenz was working with a father, Karl Schulte-Hillen, whose wife had recently given birth to a disabled baby son, and who suspected his son’s disabilities had been caused by thalidomide.
In part two of the podcast, the battle to get thalidomide off the market begins. The FDA is appalled to discover that a drug unapproved in the US, has been dispensed by over 1,200 doctors. Even taking just one pill in pregnancy at the wrong time can cause fetal disabilities. But the tragedy unfolds further, when the FDA find to their shock, there are no proper records, so it’s almost impossible to say which American doctors have got the drug and which patients have taken it…
Jennifer Vanderbes Wonder Drug The Hidden Victims of America’s Secret Thalidomide Scandal is published by Harper Collins
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