Many people may have been shocked by President Obama’s recent apology to the Guatemalans for deliberating infecting hundreds of their parents and grandparents’ generation in the 1940s with gonorrhea and syphilis so that they could test the efficacy of a new antibiotic, but this is not an isolated incident.
I mentioned, a couple of weeks ago (Escaping the tentacle of Big Pharma), how one doctor in the US has set up a company to provide entirely independent continuing education to doctors, and there are no shortage of exposés of unhealthy links between government and the health/pharmaceutical industry – but do we really understand how much corruption there is? And is it as bad in the UK or Europe as it appears to be in the US?
For an in depth look at just how bad it is in the US take a look at a Natural News article published in January this year: Bribery in Medicine: How drug authorities, Big Pharma pushers and other medical racket operators forfeit ethics for power and profits.
In theory the US has more major pharmaceutical companies than the UK and Europe and the regulatory framework over here, particularly in Europe, is tighter. But in a multinational world I wonder how much difference that really makes?