December 12th, 2011

From the New York Times:

PARIS — In 33 years on pharmacy shelves here, the diabetes drug Mediator was prescribed to an estimated five million French patients, many of them diabetics, many others hoping simply to lose weight. When French authorities ordered the drug off the market in 2009, alerted to possible cardiovascular risks, there were 300,000 active prescriptions.

Politicians and the press have pilloried Servier, charging that it concealed the dangers of Mediator for decades and insisting that the company has a wider history of disregarding health concerns about its products. Many have noted that two Servier weight-loss products, both closely related to Mediator, were at the center of the fen-phen scandal of the late 1990s in the United States.

Read more on the regulatory conditions both abroad and in the U.S. from the NYT here.