Word: phen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bristol Myers Squibb and American Home Products are his favorites. Drug analyst Barbara Ryan of Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown concurs: she says estimates for Bristol's earnings are too low--she's penciling in 13% or 14% annually over the next three years. And now that the fen-phen fiasco is behind American Home, she says, the company can concentrate on drugs like Enbrel for rheumatoid arthritis...
...supersize awards didn't just make victims and lawyers rich. They also got corporations to take notice--and to change their conduct. The Ford Pinto, alleged to be prone to erupt in flames after rear-end collisions, was taken off the market. Drugs with severe side effects, such as "phen-fen," were yanked from pharmacy shelves. A $1.8 million verdict in 1980 on behalf of a four-year-old girl who had been badly burned in 1970 persuaded a manufacturer to stop making flammable pajamas--and helped spur more rigorous federal regulations on children's sleepwear...
Unless medical science provides a quick fix, that is. So far, the record on diet pills has been pretty dismal. Amphetamines, which speeded metabolism and suppressed appetite, looked promising in the 1950s and '60s but turned out to be physically harmful and powerfully addictive. Drugs like fen-phen and Redux, which alter the brain's chemistry, had scary side effects. Newer drugs like orlistat and food substitutes like olestra keep fat from entering the body, but they cause serious bowel discomfort...
AMERICAN HOME PRODUCTS Fen-phen maker cuts $3.75 billion settlement for injuries. Talk about belt tightening...
...doesn?t look good for the drug's makers. The lawyers for Debbie Lovett, 36, sounded like they?d watched a tobacco trial or two in their time. They claimed that Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, a subsidiary of American Home Products, knew the dangers of fen-phen?s dangerous half, fenfluramine, long before the FDA yanked it off the market in May 1997 -- and hid their research from an unsuspecting public. Which left the defense spluttering that Ms. Lovett?s obesity carried its own risks; she knew what she was getting into. The jury didn...