Second, Grünenthal failed to insist that its sister company in Madrid warn Spanish doctors, and permitted it to not warn them. First, state controls and safeguarding were poor indeed, it was not until 2008 that the government even admitted the country had ever imported thalidomide. In Spain, thalidomide was widely available throughout the 1970s, and perhaps even into the 1980s.
The UK government gave survivors a grant of £20 million, to be distributed through the Thalidomide Trust, in December 2009. In 1997, Diageo (formed by a merger between Grand Metropolitan and Guinness, who had taken over Distillers in 1990) made a long-term financial commitment to support the Thalidomide Trust and its beneficiaries. The British Thalidomide Children’s Trust was set up in 1973 as part of a £20 million legal settlement between Distillers Company and 429 children with thalidomide-related disabilities.
Distillers Biochemicals paid out approximately £28m in compensation following a legal battle. In 1968, after a long campaign by The Sunday Times, a compensation settlement for the UK victims was reached with Distillers Company (now part of Diageo), which had distributed the drug in the UK. Of the approximately 2,000 babies born with defects, around half died within a few months and 466 survived to at least 2010. In the UK, the drug was licensed in 1958 and withdrawn in 1961. United Kingdom Īrtificial limbs made for an affected child in the 1960s by the Department of Health and Social Security's Limb Fitting Centre in Roehampton, London It is not known exactly how many worldwide victims of thalidomide embryopathy there have been, although estimates range from 10,000 to 20,000. Thalidomide did not damage the fetus if taken after 42 days' gestation. The severity and location of the deformities depended on how many days into the pregnancy the mother was before beginning treatment thalidomide taken on the 20th day of pregnancy caused central brain damage, day 21 would damage the eyes, day 22 the ears and face, day 24 the arms, and leg damage would occur if taken up to day 28. The birth defects of thalidomide led to the development of greater drug regulation and monitoring in many countries. Its initial entry into the US market was prevented by Frances Kelsey at the FDA. Those who survived had limb, eye, urinary tract, and heart defects. The total number of people affected by the use of thalidomide during the mother's pregnancy is estimated at more than 10,000, of whom approximately 40 percent died at or shortly after the time of birth. Ambros was the chairman of Grünenthal's advisory committee during the development of thalidomide and was a board member when Contergan was being sold. He hired Martin Staemmler, a medical doctor and leading proponent of the Nazi eugenics programme, as head of pathology, as well as Heinz Baumkötter, the chief medical officer at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and Otto Ambros, who had been Hitler's adviser on chemical warfare. Wirtz appointed chemist Heinrich Mückter, a known Nazi war criminal, to head the development programme because of his experience researching and producing an anti-typhus vaccine for Nazi Germany. The company's initial aim was to develop antibiotics for which there was an urgent market need. The company had been established by Hermann Wirtz, Sr, a Nazi Party member, after World War II as a subsidiary of the family's Mäurer & Wirtz company. Thalidomide was developed and first released by the small, relatively new German pharmaceutical company Chemie Grünenthal in 1954.
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