More Drug Usage, More Dangers

The FDA is tap dancing furiously over this. They say it could be caused by a lot of things other than inadequate oversight on their part.

Archives of Internal Medicine: Serious Adverse Drug Events Reported to the Food and Drug Administration, 1998-2005, 2007-Sep-10, by Thomas J. Moore, AB; Michael R. Cohen, RPh, MS, ScD; Curt D. Furberg, MD, PhD (via USA Today)

From 1998 through 2005, reported serious adverse drug events increased 2.6-fold from 34,966 to 89,842, and fatal adverse drug events increased 2.7-fold from 5,519 to 15,107. Reported serious events increased 4 times faster than the total number of outpatient prescriptions during the period. In a subset of drugs with 500 or more cases reported in any year, drugs related to safety withdrawals accounted for 26% of reported events in that group in 1999, declining to less than 1% in 2005. For 13 new biotechnology products, reported serious events grew 15.8-fold, from 580 reported in 1998 to 9181 in 2005. The increase was influenced by relatively few drugs: 298 of the 1489 drugs identified (20%) accounted for 407 394 of the 467 809 events (87%).