You may want to know more about a new prescription drug, such as how quickly the drug was approved by Health Canada, whether there have been any recent safety warnings about it or how the drug compares to other medications for the same condition.
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If you want to know more about a drug, Health Canada provides information online through several websites. However, some information appears to be getting harder to find.
Horseshoe crabs play a unique role in medicine, but they’re also ecologically important in their home waters along the Atlantic coast. Can regulators balance the needs of humans and nature?
When regulatory agencies like Health Canada approve a new drug, they require the drug company to continue monitoring the product’s safety.
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Health Canada continues to monitor newly approved drugs to determine if the benefits identified in the pre-market trials hold up to further scrutiny. Canadians need better access to that information.
In addition to evaluating new drug applications, the FDA also inspects drug manufacturing facilities.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration/Flickr
As the government’s oldest consumer protection agency, the FDA has long butted up against drugmakers, activists and politicians. But undermining its work could be harmful to patient health and safety.
The level of evidence for withdrawing a drug does not appear to affect the pharma company’s response.
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When drugs are taken off the market because they are either unsafe or don’t work, do pharma companies admit that there are problems? Or do they deny the evidence?
Herbal remedies are commonplace in Uganda; testing these scientifically is a good way to ensure they’re safe and effective.
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It is important that herbal medicine be checked for its safety, its potential to treat particular ailments, and to ascertain its chemical components.
Though drug recalls are relatively uncommon in the U.S., reduced inspections increase the likelihood of manufacturing errors that slip through the cracks.
AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool
COVID-19 has exacerbated a backlog of domestic and foreign drug manufacturing inspections that the FDA is still too short-staffed to adequately deal with.
Vaccine production staff demonstrate operations at a facility in Germany.
AP Photo/Michael Probst
The FDA recalled commonly used heartburn and ulcer medication ranitidine in April 2020. But new research suggests less reason for alarm.
Despite monitoring the same drugs, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States issued the same drug warnings only seven per cent of the time over a 10-year period.
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Health Canada devotes far more resources to getting new drugs onto the market compared to making sure that drugs already being sold are safe.
A lab technician holds a vial of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate during testing at the Chula Vaccine Research Center, run by Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand on May 25, 2020.
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Will a vaccine for COVID-19 be safe? Animal testing, human clinical trials and post-approval surveillance give us good grounds to believe that a future approved vaccine will work and be safe.
The idea that we can sit down calmly and rationally and explain to our children how they can take drugs safely overlooks a bundle of emotional issues.
Festival goers bring their phones. So why not use them to receive tweets about high-dose drugs in circulation, as the UK is doing?
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There are many ways to reduce harm from drugs at music festivals beyond the much publicised pill testing. Here’s what else we can do.
Human challenge studies can be useful to test new vaccines and are increasingly being used internationally. Yet there are several ethical issues to consider.
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Deliberately infecting people with a disease-causing agent as part of carefully considered medical research can be ethically acceptable or even necessary.
An animal experiment in a laboratory of the pharmaceutical company “Chemie Gruenenthal,” which manufactured the drug Thalidomide, in West Germany in 1969. Thalidomide was prescribed by doctors as a mild sleeping pill and for relief of morning sickness but caused the miscarriage and birth of thousands of children with severe malformations globally.
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A new book, ‘The Thalidomide Catastrophe,’ raises new questions about the conduct of corporations involved. It is the duty of governments to find out the answers.
There’s a common, popular and well-studied method to ensure new technologies are safe and effective for public use – even if researchers don’t fully understand how they work.
Health Canada’s intention to increase the fees drug makers pay for the drug approval process threatens to compromise drug safety and the health of the Canadian public.
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Health Canada proposes to increase fees to the pharmaceutical industry for prescription drug approval. This will compromise drug safety and is a risk to the health of the Canadian public.