The Shadow of the Thalidomide Tragedy | Retro Report | The New York Times

[Music] afternoon I have several announcements every doctor every hospital every nurse have been notified every woman in this country must be aware that it's most important that they check their medicine cabinet that they do not take this drug in the early 1960s no drugs struck more fear into the hearts of pregnant women one of the most horrifying episodes in medical history then thalidomide it changed our relationship with the drugs we use one reason u.s. drug laws are so strict solidified and became an example of what many saw as corporate greed at its worst British falooda my children so far have not received any compensation from the rich company that made the drug which crippled them so brutally but this dark chapter is only part of thalidomide enigmatic story one that continues to reverberate today I had used up every other alternative when I took the lead on I [Music] in 1960 a new wonder drug was slated to arrive on American shores a sedative that was said to also treat a range of other ills a hypnotic as the doctors call it that was the answer to a prayer its generic name was fully divided the hallmark defining quality of the lid amide was its safety so saved that in Germany there was no prescription needed the German company that developed fill an amide chemi Grune in Thal claimed that even pregnant women could take it the drug company had handed out samples of this drug all over the place starting with employees of its own company on Christmas Day in 1956 a baby girl was born in Germany without ears and she was the daughter of an employee of the drug company Grune and the home no immediate connection was made to filete imide which soon sold nearly as well as aspirin in some European countries we received it in quantities like a thousand pills who had tremendous pressure all over the world to get this wonderful new drug on the market they had 2 million tablets ready to go the moment the FDA approved the drug which was almost a foregone conclusion until one doctor came along and began working at the FDA it just so happened that my first application was for the drug thalidomide I got this because I was new and they thought I should have an easy one to start on but dr. Kelsey was uneasy with what she saw as the lack of rigorous scientific studies and the slipshod presentation of safety data provided by GRU Ninh Thal and William s Merrill the u.s. distributor of the drug the best thing that could be said about solidified at the time was simply that you could not kill a rat no matter how much solid amide the rat ate with thalidomide being prescribed for morning sickness in other countries Kelsey became particularly concerned with what effect it might have on a developing fetus in June of 1961 an article appeared promoting its safety during late pregnancy it was allegedly written by a dr. Rehn Olsen but in fact the article was written by the medical director of the drug company about six months later long ignored evidence became public in Germany linking filete imide to a rash of birth defects although hundreds of thousands of pre market samples had been provided to American doctors dr. Kelsey stubborn delay of the drugs approval for more than a year had prevented a similar scale of tragedy from unfolding in the United States dr. Kelsey was absolutely a unique hero in American history but thalidomide 's reach continued to be felt across the rest of the world including in trinidad and tobago where Gisele Cole was born when I came along I'm a first born and they were young married couple I mean I was never unloved or not wanted or anything like that but I would be foolish to think that it was easy for them my disability is the official term is folk Amelia I'm coming from the Greek being shorter arms or flipper Lake I think people always expect that I would have been angry and I'm certainly not angry never have been long discussed but seldom implemented major regulatory reforms were finally forced on the pharmaceutical industry following the thalidomide scandal for some time President Kennedy has tried to get Congress to approve new control but without much success now with the thalidomide scare most of the opposition is melted largely the same FDA guidelines that we live under today were created in the immediate wake these regulations were too late for the lid amides thousands of surviving victims across the world who soon became the story Phillipa Brad Bourne is one example her mother rejected her ten year old called Davies leaves a relatively normal life for a boy without arms one other young mother her husband her sister and her doctor are charged with the mercy killing of her deformed infant I'm one of the lucky ones in that my parents were adamant that I was their daughter and their daughter first before anything else and it was treated as such many were put in homes because they just didn't know what to do some families battled with doctors to have amputation of fingers and toes and whatnot to accommodate these prosthetics many families were broken irrevocably instead of quickly settling the drug companies dug in with Grune and Thal originally arguing that the children's deformities were caused by everything from nuclear fallout to botched home abortions anything but the lid imide it was a very long difficult process most cases were eventually settled but litigation continues with some survivors saying the original settlements cannot cover the cost of their specialized care Grune and Thal didn't apologize to its victims until 2012 50 years after the tragedy unfolded they issued a statement saying that just a human the 50 years to come forward to say anything because they were shocked they don't have a right to be shocked the shock doesn't belong to them despite all that the lid amides victims endured over the decades they could long take solace in one simple fact salud amide is now banned everywhere the now ban elyda mod the drug was banned in 1962 and I would have liked to have seen it never used again there's a tremendous amount of luck in science it's almost like an Easter egg hunt in 1992 while conducting research into macular degeneration ophthalmologist Robert D'Amato began his own hunt this one to find a pill that might restrict blood vessel growth I started searching for drugs that cause some sort of damage to a fetus a birth defect and at the top of this list was Saluda my although thalidomide had been banned around the world unbeknownst to many the drug was later made available for limited humanitarian use thanks to a chance discovery in 1964 a doctor in Jerusalem was taking care of a patient who had such severe leprosy that he was in pain and couldn't sleep he decided to treat the patient with fluid my to see if it would help with the sleep and began to notice that there was also improvements generally in the leprosy after much trial and error dr. D'Amato finally had a similar breakthrough when he demonstrated that thalidomide could starve blood flow to cells a discovery that held the potential for treating cancerous tumors the people that really understood the results were excited because we had a tool that we didn't have before but the knee-jerk reaction was this is a dangerous drug know whatever want to use it there was thousands of victims that still remain there had been a promise that foot imide would never be developed again we had to make a decision what position we were going to take many would have thought and expected that we would have been screaming no no no no no but following a surge of reports about promising studies that's not what happened yeah nervous we're of course frightened and dismayed but we realized that this is not a perfect world falooda mite is back the Food and Drug Administration says the litter mite will be the most restricted drug ever distributed female patients taking the drug will even have to submit to pregnancy tests since then the lid amide has gone on to combat a surprising variety of diseases from tuberculosis and Crohn's disease to multiple sclerosis and symptoms of HIV and AIDS and d'amato's hunch about the drugs effect on cancerous tumors paid off in a groundbreaking treatment for certain types of a disease slit mine and its derivatives have become the primary treatment for multiple myeloma it's a very fine line that I walk in many of us walk when we think about balloon ride in today's world clearly you can see what it has done to the thousands of us who are still on this earth but if it provides some kind of assistance help relief of suffering then I cannot in good conscience be a post Brenner who saw thalidomide curative powers firsthand after being prescribed it for a deadly skin disease says that the drug circuitous history tells us a great deal about the accidental nature of drug discovery it's kind of surprising I think to most people to learn that drugs are in fact developed and then become as they're called a drug in search of a disease when you have a drug that has a powerful activity whether it's negative or not that powerful activity could be used for something something good if you could figure out what that was but for all its benefits the scientific rehabilitation of Follette imide has come with a heavy cost we were told this could never happen again in Brazil where the drug is used extensively to treat leprosy researchers report that the lid amide children continue to be born as many as 100 since 2005 by one recent estimate fifty years down the road I would like to think that there's no such thing fiddling light that we have created something we have developed something that would allow us to bury the little I'd literally destroy it get rid of it so that there are no further discussions other than a node in history [Music]

Channel: The New York Times

Views: 7,795,272

Keywords: Thalidomide (Drug), birth deformity, Obstetrics (Medical Specialty), Medicine (Field Of Study), retro report, Frances Kelsey, William S. Merrel, Contergan, FDA, drug recall, Disability (Taxonomy Subject), Pharmaceutical Industry (Industry), drug regulation, thalidomide victims, Grünenthal, thalidomide story, thalidomide babies, thalidomide tragedy, thalidomide arms, thalidomide disaster, The New York Times, NY Times, NYT, Times Video, nytimes.com, news, newspaper, feature, reporting

Id: 41n3mDoVbvk

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 23 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/davidreiss666]

Frances Oldham Kelsey prevented the FDA from approving the drug for use in the United States. She didn't blindly believe the claims of the drug manufacturer and wanted to see real studies. As such, the drug was never approved for use in the United States.

[u/remember_the_alpacas]

Awful. Just awful. Corporate greed man. Anything to make a quick buck

[u/ReturnWinchester]

I hate how so often fear gets into the way of rational decision making. Drugs are simply tools with effects. In this case, the failure was not understanding those effects beforehand which resulted in the deformed births. PLENTY of drugs widely prescribed cause really bad birth defects; just one example is Accutane (Isotretinoin) for acne.

Just because a tool has certain negative effects under specific circumstances doesn't mean it should be wholesale banned.

[u/idga_chuck]

Good watch, I had never knew about thalidomide.

[u/fokjoudoos]

"Everyone against big pharma making money off Thalidomide again, please raise your hands.......anyone??"