[HN Gopher] Elixir Sulfanilamide
___________________________________________________________________
Elixir Sulfanilamide
Author : benbreen
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-09-29 00:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| CompelTechnic wrote:
| An honest analysis that seeks to understand the best level of
| regulation for testing of new drugs must consider both the people
| that will die due to inadequate testing and the people that will
| die from drugs never being developed (or being developed much
| later) due to overbearing testing requirements.
| anvic wrote:
| What a manipulative article. All that is needed is a sob story
| about a dying child or something. Oh wait there it is.
| pmarreck wrote:
| How is an example of a child death from it, "manipulative"? Are
| you not supposed to be moved by an example of a human death to
| a poison marketed as a drug?
| anvic wrote:
| I am supposed to be moved by it, which is precisely why it
| doesn't belong there.
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| This reminded me of another story I saw, where the same chemical
| diethylene glycol caused another mass poisoning
|
| https://youtu.be/qhN-o2ame-4
| pmarreck wrote:
| "well, it's cheap wine, what did you expect?" (As if I should
| be willing to accept a significant risk of death for a $13
| bottle of wine!)
|
| If you aren't convinced that things haven't gotten better over
| the years, here's your proof.
| amelius wrote:
| The story is very much related to this story. From Wikipedia:
|
| > In 1937, S.E. Massengill Co. (a Tennessee drug company),
| manufactured sulfanilamide dissolved with diethylene glycol, to
| create a liquid alternative of this drug. The company tested
| the new product, Elixir sulfanilamide, for viscosity,
| appearance and fragrance. At the time, the food and drug laws
| did not require toxicological analysis before releasing for
| sale. When 105 people died in 15 states during the months of
| September and October, the trail led back to the elixir, and
| the toxic potential of this chemical was revealed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylene_glycol#Epidemiology
| chromatin wrote:
| This is relevant in light of the US senate recently passing a
| measure that removes the requirement for animal testing of
| pharmaceutical products prior to commencement of phase 1 studies.
|
| Note that the congress.gov link is outdated: the bill unanimously
| passed in the senate on Sep 29.
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/295...
| refurb wrote:
| The bill doesn't prevent the use of animal studies, it just
| allows other studies to be used to prove pre-clinical safety.
| The requirement to prove a basic level of safety before doing
| human trials doesn't change.
|
| _"(1) Cell-based assays.
|
| "(2) Organ chips and microphysiological systems.
|
| "(3) Computer models.
|
| "(4) Other non-animal or human biology-based test methods.
|
| "(5) Animal tests."._
| lend000 wrote:
| This post on the eve of the animal testing requirement is
| honestly even less compelling than the argument "what about the
| bad guys" when politicians talk about outlawing encryption.
|
| The US FDA, as it exists today, is the single biggest hurdle to
| global medical progress (because other developed countries with
| socialized medicine are still getting about half their new
| drugs from the US). It costs a billion+ dollars (in FDA testing
| alone) and many years to push a single drug into the market.
| Even during an unprecedented pandemic where things are being
| rushed and all the world's pharmaceutical resources are poured
| into the drug development, it still took a solid year after
| vaccines were developed.
|
| 90 years ago, animal testing was often the best option. But in
| this specific example, the drug manufacturer didn't do any kind
| of testing at all, so it isn't much of a fair comparison. And
| as a sibling commenter mentioned, there are other effective
| tests that can be done before human trials, saving time and
| animals.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Juts assuming that Big Pharma is greedy, isn't it cheaper to
| kill a few mice instead of a few humans in a phase 1 study? In
| which cases they can skip the animal tests?
| gnfargbl wrote:
| > The owner of the company, when pressed to admit some measure of
| culpability, infamously answered, "We have been supplying a
| legitimate professional demand and not once could have foreseen
| the unlooked-for results. I do not feel that there was any
| responsibility on our part."
|
| Could be a statement made by a drug company owner in the late
| 1930s, or an autocratic-government-friendly exploit broker in the
| early 2020s. _Plus ca change._
| tyingq wrote:
| Grunenthal's apology for Thalidomide in 2012, 50 years after it
| was removed from the market, included this statement:
|
| _"Grunenthal acted in accordance with the state of scientific
| knowledge and all industry standards for testing new drugs that
| were relevant and acknowledged in the 1950s and 1960s."_
| mannykannot wrote:
| Richard Sackler in 2021: his family and Purdue Pharma are not
| to blame for US opioid crisis.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/20/us/purdue-pharma-richard-sack...
| anonym29 wrote:
| Any doctor who believed in addiction-proof opiates wasn't
| worth their salt to begin with. Opiates are opiates.
|
| Any consumer who took opiates and got addicted has exactly
| one person to blame - themselves for being uninformed.
|
| I love recreational drugs, and I've had back problems that
| required more than NSAID's alone, but I've never taken
| opiates, and I never will until I'm ready to die, because I
| know just how awesome they are.
|
| Blaming the manufacturer for opiate deaths is like blaming
| manufacturers for firearm deaths, rather than the shooters.
| loceng wrote:
| If you follow Gabor Mate and his understanding, you aren't
| prone to addiction if there isn't underlying trauma or
| suffering, possibly that you're unaware of and haven't
| processed yet.
|
| I've had many dozens of procedures where afterward I need
| an opiate prescription. I try to only take them for as long
| as necessary, usually no more than 2 days, because I know
| an extra 12-24 hours does start to get into mild withdrawal
| for me. The fearful scenario you're painting more sounds
| like when someone shoots up an opiate directly into their
| veins.
|
| More recently however I've had different procedures,
| surgeries, the prior being stem cell treatments - and I've
| needed to take opiates up to 4-5 days due to post surgery
| pain. But these surgeries reduced my pain so much that the
| mild withdrawal was the same or less than when I was used
| to just taking them for 2 days.
|
| What I actually wanted to is that as the pain in my body
| reduced (from whatever procedure I was getting done), then
| the withdrawal was easier, less present - arguably as there
| was returning into less pain in my body as the opiates wore
| off.
|
| I'm talking about physical pain above, but physical and
| emotional pain share the same pathways - and if someone
| isn't actually properly grounded, connected, to their body,
| and its sensory, they may not realize how much pain their
| body is actually signalling, and then I imagine opiates
| could quickly become a problem for someone.
|
| TL;DR: Opiates aren't actually that great unless you're in
| pain - though that's supposing you're taking the actual
| medicinal use level dose - and not taking 4-10x+
| recommended; I can't speak to that.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > Any consumer who took opiates and got addicted has
| exactly one person to blame - themselves for being
| uninformed.
|
| Let's see how you feel after you've been in a serious car
| accident, then.
|
| Heaven forfend such a thing should happen, but I'm prepared
| to bet you'd be hitting the fentanyl as hard as you
| possibly could.
| anonym29 wrote:
| I want to thank you for helping me gain some perspective
| here. I was thinking seriously about the hypothetical
| scenario you described, and it occured to me that I might
| be imposing an unrealistic standard on the typical
| consumer, informed by my unique lived experiences, and
| what may amount to a subject matter knowledge on opiates
| that exceeds what the typical consumer can be reasonably
| expected to have.
| bgribble wrote:
| There was a period of time (00's) when it was hard to get
| out of an episode of medical treatment for any kind of
| injury or pain complaint without a script for Vicodin in
| your hand. You had to actively refuse them at every turn.
|
| This was bad medicine, implemented by oblivious (or
| complicit) docs, pushed by bad practices by drug companies.
| Don't blame the patient.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Any consumer who took opiates and got addicted has
| exactly one person to blame - themselves for being
| uninformed.
|
| This is a reprehensible point of view. Consumers can't be
| expected to place their personal medical judgements above
| that of their doctors and their government's regulatory
| agencies. We in fact attack them 24 hours a day if they do,
| and call them stupid selfish traitors under the mind
| control of foreign powers whose only goal is to foment
| strife and destroy our unity and world leadership through
| the corruption of our soul, the science, and the facts.
|
| Besides that, people have to work and they don't have time
| to independently determine if their cellphones will give
| them brain cancer. They rely on _experts_ and _authorities_
| to tell them, on the morning news, as they run out of the
| door on the way to work.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Tell that to the millions of victims of medical
| malpractice. Doctors make mistakes just like everyone
| else.
|
| You might attack people for having a healthy skepticism
| of both doctors and deeply corrupt government regulatory
| agencies that have a revolving door with big business - I
| encourage it.
|
| Most people work 8-10 hours and sleep about 8 hours. That
| leaves a lot of time to perform a perfunctory reading of
| the Wikipedia article on the drug you were just
| prescribed before taking it.
|
| Go look at the very first (2002) version of the wikipedia
| page for Oxycodone, for crying out loud. This drug was
| publicly known as dangerous and addictive on what is
| probably the most accessible source of information for
| common people since 2002 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/i
| ndex.php?title=Oxycodone&oldid...
| gus_massa wrote:
| Can I agree with both of you?
|
| Reading the info from Wikipedia is difficult if you have
| no chemistry education. For complex cases I read
| Wikipedia and also obscures sites of Internet with a huge
| bag of salt on the side of the screen, but it's
| difficult.
|
| My recommendation is to get a second opinion (from a real
| medical doctor) and perhaps a third, and sometimes more.
|
| For normal people a pill looks innocuous enough to take
| the medical advice at face value. Anyway, opioids have a
| long history to get my spider sense is tingling, even
| before the recent 10 year events.
| anonym29 wrote:
| I have zero chemistry education and I find it completely
| readable and easy to understand.
|
| 100% agreed that people should seek second and third
| opinions from medical "professionals" - from whom medical
| malpractice is one of the top 10 leading causes of death
| in the USA.
| gus_massa wrote:
| In every profession there are good, regular and bad ones.
| The second opinion is to try to avoid the worse ones, and
| evaluate if the first treatment is the mainstream opinion
| or a crackpot idea.
|
| Anyway, they are doing very complicated stuff, like
| cutting people in half and messing with the internal
| plumbing. In same cases it's hard to hide mistakes under
| the carpet like with git --amend. It's like plane pilots,
| any mistake can be fatal.
|
| For some reason plane pilots have checklist for
| everything, and very regulated maximal time without rest.
| Anyway, IIRC surgeons at least count the number of gauze
| they put and remove inside the patient, but are against
| checklists. And they still have some weird long shifts in
| some positions, like 12, 16 or 24 hours https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)#Adoption_...
| jandrese wrote:
| I can see doctors being deceived by the drug company
| marketing. I mean how are they supposed to know that the
| huge pharmaceutical company is outright lying to them? But
| it should be obvious pretty quickly that their patients are
| getting addicted to these supposedly non-addictive drugs.
| There was a serious failure of public policy not to pull
| those drugs once it became clear that they were causing
| more harm than the drugs they were replacing. One suspects
| regulatory capture delayed action on this issue. Either
| that or there was a "well, at least it isn't Heroin"
| mentality, but maybe that just made the problem worse since
| doctors would have at least thought twice before
| prescribing Heroin.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > Blaming the manufacturer for opiate deaths is like
| blaming manufacturers for firearm deaths, rather than the
| shooters.
|
| Columbian cartels whole-heartedly agree. They're just
| manufacturing and shipping the stuff, they don't make you
| buy and use it! Stop the war on drugs, legalize over-the-
| counter opiates, inform the consumers, and in five years
| you won't recognize the society -- that's how drastically
| it will improve^!
|
| ^ "improve" here means "change", and may include both
| positive and negative improvement. Void where applicable.
| anonym29 wrote:
| 100% agreed, full stop.
| User23 wrote:
| Barely over a century ago you could walk into any
| pharmacy in America and buy a vial of cocaine and some
| heroin no problem, with a pint of whiskey to wash it
| down. It was precisely on account of rampant drug abuse
| and the resultant social ills that we got drug control.
|
| Of course the modern regime somehow manages to combine
| the worst outcomes of both permissiveness and
| prohibition. We now have junkies overrunning our public
| spaces while a draconian enforcement regime manages to
| trample our civil rights without providing any social
| benefit.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Ergo the need to legalize.
|
| It's not that drug abuse is good or that we ought to
| encourage it, it's that criminalizing it only makes the
| situation worse without solving the original problem.
| Criminalization is an entirely unnecessary added harm,
| while simultaneously failing to deliver on the premise of
| the justification for it.
| User23 wrote:
| I mostly agree with you, but observe that public drug
| abuse is already de facto decriminalized in our major
| cities. Clearly decriminalization is no magic bullet
| either.
|
| I don't propose any kind of one size fits all solution
| because I don't think any such thing exists. I do think
| that if there is a policy solution, it will necessarily
| involve demand reduction[1], social services, and yes in
| some cases putting addicts into some kind of custodial
| managed living environment. All of that being tailored to
| the needs and resources of each particular locale.
| Practically speaking those treatment centers be a jail or
| an involuntary hospital, but ideally it would look a lot
| more like a nice rehab facility with incentives for
| fostering recovery.
|
| Edit: [1] I intentionally left out supply reduction,
| because I think we have sufficient evidence that it is
| impracticable.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Want to reduce demand for recreational drugs? Check out
| this one simple trick the DEA doesn't want you to know! -
| https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-
| decriminalizatio...
| spamizbad wrote:
| I think you overestimate doctors.
|
| In the early aughts I was prescribed vicodin (which I
| didn't take) and made a joke "I hope I don't get addicted
| to these" and my doctor laughed and said "These aren't like
| opium or heroin. They're non-habit forming if used as
| directed"
|
| I suspect the "if used as directed" was doing a lot of
| work.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Right, because what else goes together like "most
| addictive class of drugs known to man" and "unlikely to
| be abused"?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| You think the average consumer has an education in
| biochemistry and pharmacy science? I'd like to visit the
| version of America you are living in.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Is the implication that one needs a postgraduate degree
| in biochemistry to understand that "opiates are
| addictive" - in a country where almost everyone has
| instant 24/7 access to almost all of human knowledge ever
| recorded?
|
| If that's your argument, it's a miracle these people
| didn't die earlier from drinking bleach, thinking it was
| a tasty beverage.
| geomark wrote:
| Or they took the advice of an authority figure who
| suggested drinking disinfectant to cure a certain viral
| disease. JK
| anonym29 wrote:
| Personally, I much preferred sunlight injection therapy
| to lung bleach therapy! ;)
| arrosenberg wrote:
| If doctors and television were promoting it as heavily as
| they did opiates, people would absolutely die from it.
| People got very sick during COVID from trying bleach and
| ivermectin because a reality TV star told them to. Again,
| your America sounds amazing, I'd love to visit someday.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do you have any sources on people
| getting more ill from ivermectin than from COVID, or any
| sources of anyone actually trying to consume, ingest, or
| inject bleach?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| It is irrelevant whether or not people got _more_ ill
| from taking Ivermectin (though many did get sicker from
| delaying actual treatment in favor of horse dewormer).
| Your argument was the consumers should be responsible for
| discerning a good course of treatment from a bad one. The
| use of Ivermectin to treat a viral disease is completely
| inline with the assertion that the average American has
| no education on this stuff, and will take what the TV and
| trusted figures tell them to.
| jotm wrote:
| You... Really don't.
|
| I will say that you should try some only if you're
| desperate, but I wasted over a decade of my life suffering
| and thinking illegal stimulants like meth and amphetamine
| will make me a retarded addict... But they didn't.
|
| I quit drinking and fixed anxiety and depression with GHB
| and pregabalin. I can quit them in several days. Zero
| problems Afterwards (except bring back to my old self).
|
| I fixed my attention/energy problems with aPVP,
| methamphetamine and amphetamine. Now using the latter
| because it's super cheap and available and the former two
| have too many side effects. But they're all useful in a
| pinch.
|
| Heroin? GHB feels better! I also hate cannabis which most
| people love.
|
| All I'm saying is the effects are actually different by
| person and dosage. But falling into a binge is easy and I
| know many people can't get out of it.
| quesera wrote:
| > Any consumer who took opiates and got addicted has
| exactly one person to blame - themselves for being
| uninformed.
|
| You greatly overestimate the reasoning abilities of
| suffering humans.
|
| Manufacturer promotes, doctor prescribes, patient ingests.
|
| Doctors should know better than to assume that the mfr is
| motivated only by the patients' well-being, but the patient
| should be able to trust their doctor.
|
| In some cases, the medical team _does not ask you_ whether
| you want opioids. Are you going to get "NoOps" tattooed on
| your forearms and butt where the IVs might be placed during
| your unconsciousness?
|
| This has nothing to do with firearms.
| anonym29 wrote:
| >This has nothing to do with firearms.
|
| Way to completely miss the point. That's an analogy that
| explains that manufacturers can't reasonably be held
| responsible for the actions of independent consumers. The
| manufacturer didn't make that decision, the consumer did.
|
| Now you can argue that the manufacturer was manipulative
| in effort to achieve greater profit, and thus has partial
| liability, but do we collectively feel as angry at
| Facebook for all the suicides that were influenced from
| deliberate psychological manipulation campaigns the
| company performed to shift people's feelings? If so,
| where's the outrage?
|
| Sacklers are an easy target because people hold bias
| against "old rich white conservatives". I hear more
| people complaining about this than I hear complaining
| about 3M & DuPont, who have managed to put small amounts
| of a known carcinogen in the bloodstream of about 99.9%
| of the population of the entire planet with PFOA/PFOS in
| Teflon & related chemicals, and then proceeded to
| basically change 1 atom in the molecule and create an
| entirely new product that thus far appears to be
| identically harmful (GenX) after PFOA was banned - and
| spun off a holding company to sell that product to
| completely shield themselves from legal culpability.
|
| Where's the outrage at that? Statistically speaking,
| DuPont harmed you, the Sacklers didn't. Why the popular
| anger at one and popular indifference towards the other?
|
| Answer: people are stupid. Stupid doctors trusted an
| untrustworthy company. Stupid patients trusted their
| stupid doctors. They're mad at themselves for falling for
| something that dumb. Also so stupid that many who were
| harmed by DuPont but not harmed by the Sacklers don't
| even realize that fact.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Analogies get in the way too often. Especially when
| they're bridging several politically sensitive topics.
| They're fine for illustrating an unfamiliar idea, but as
| soon as a conversation turns to debate or argument, the
| rhetorical usefulness of analogies drops off hard.
| anonym29 wrote:
| That's a view I can't say I've been exposed to before.
| Thank you for the feedback.
| quesera wrote:
| I didn't miss the point. The firearms thing was
| tangential at best.
|
| The rest of your follow up comment is also tangential,
| although much more interesting than the firearms junk.
| orangepurple wrote:
| At what point is it useful to blame a manufacturer for
| making a tool available which can lead to serious bodily
| harm?
|
| This is the fundamental question behind drugs and
| firearms. It all boils down to how stupid, informed,
| impulsive, and gullible people are at various layers of
| the sales, distribution, and usage stack.
|
| For firearms city dwellers generally believe the buck
| stops with manufacturers because if they didn't exist
| then nobody would shoot each other anymore (sic).
|
| For drugs many believe the buck stops with doctors
| because they are the patient's advocate and authority
| figures perpetually repeat that doctors always know best
| because they are educated in the matter and the average
| person isn't. Americans have generally internalized this
| propaganda.
| anonym29 wrote:
| expertise != good decision making
|
| https://www.rutgers.edu/news/expertise-liability-experts-
| may...
| gusgus01 wrote:
| I've seen outrage about PFAS, eg the recent rainwater
| isn't safe to drink according to the EPA articles.
| There's also been many campaigns over the years about
| various chemical additives, eg BPA. You've also got lots
| of people rallying against user/overuse of pesticides and
| herbicides. I'd wager it's less that the Sacklers are an
| easy target (as shown by the continued lack of any
| consequences), but more that it's a slow build up of
| anger over the continued abuse of people for profit.
|
| Also, people are not stupid for trusting doctors. Are you
| not supposed to listen to professionals with usually more
| than a decade more of education in a specific field than
| you?
| anonym29 wrote:
| expertise != good decision making
| (https://www.rutgers.edu/news/expertise-liability-
| experts-may...)
|
| You are about eight times more likely to be killed by a
| doctor than by an automobile accident, and only about 10%
| of such deaths are reported
| (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28186008/).
|
| People are, empirically, objectively, and measurably
| stupid for trusting doctors more than they trust the
| safety of being in an automobile.
| mannykannot wrote:
| You seem to be unaware of the lengths Perdue went to
| obfuscate and mislead about where the line between
| responsible and dangerous use lies. Motive matters, and
| there is no reasonable doubt here.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Motive does matter, and Purdue is not "innocent", but
| Purdue is not the only party for which a healthy portion
| of the blame falls on.
|
| If anyone's default position is to trust a private
| multibillion dollar company telling them something that
| sounds (or borders on sounding) too good to be true, I
| question whether they're even equipped to navigate their
| own lives responsibly, let alone make well-informed
| medical decisions for patients.
| mannykannot wrote:
| The thing about motive is that even if it depends on
| being able to persuade other people to act in a way that
| is against their interests, that does nothing to mitigate
| it.
| anonym29 wrote:
| If a person walks up to you and points a finger gun at
| your head and demands your wallet, I'd have very little
| sympathy for the "victim" of that robbery - they were
| more like a victim of their own gullibility.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Putting aside what I think of those ethics, you are no
| longer discussing anything remotely relevant to the
| Perdue case and the role of motive in it.
| anonym29 wrote:
| If you're unable to connect the analogy to the original
| topic, I'd encourage you to seek the opinions of as many
| doctors as possible before making any medical decisions.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Your previous post does not even address the point of the
| one it is nominally replying to.
|
| If you are unable to follow this, I suggest you look up
| the meaning of 'straw man' and 'relevance'.
| anonym29 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid
| jefftk wrote:
| The FDA has a solid origin story: make sure drugs sold are safe.
| But the 1960s expansion into regulating efficacy has not been
| positive, and the organization today is not even clearly positive
| on balance.
|
| Today if the FDA approves a drug as safe, and effective for any
| single specific use, doctors are allowed to prescribe it "off
| label" for any other use. This generally works well, and
| contributes to pharmaceutical innovation. We should expand this
| to where doctors can prescribe anything the FDA has classified as
| safe. Restricting advertising and other carrots to drugs that
| have convinced that FDA of their efficacy (as we do today for off
| label uses) is probably still good, though.
| adrianN wrote:
| Why is it better to decentralize the burden of checking the
| science behind efficacy claims?
| jefftk wrote:
| It's primarily not centralizing checking the science I object
| to, but the setting a single threshold for all of society.
| People vary a lot in what level of efficacy evidence would
| make taking a given medication worth it for them, and in
| cases where safety evaluation has already gotten us to where
| the downside looks like "it doesn't do much, money wasted" I
| think making distribution of the substance illegal is much
| too restrictive.
| samatman wrote:
| I don't think that advertising drugs to consumers should be
| legal.
|
| I'd go further, and restrict advertising to doctors to a
| specific format, something like the Nutrition Facts label we
| have for food. They'd be allowed the brand/trademark, but
| everything else is specified to be in effect a data sheet.
|
| The only thing allowing advertising to consumers will do is
| result in a lot of them insisting on, or agreeing to, drugs
| they don't actually need.
| derbOac wrote:
| In my personal opinion, medicines in the US are far too
| regulated. I agree with what you're saying about efficacy
| versus safety, but I'd even go further in my stance that safety
| is really overstated. There's a huge difference between
| something like the safety profile of elixir sulfanilamide and
| most of the drugs on the market today. Many of them could be
| distributed without a prescription over the counter, or
| distributed behind counter under the regulation of pharmacists,
| or distributed with a prescription by a wider range of
| providers. It's absurd to me that something like alcohol is
| something you can buy in the grocery, but something like
| acyclovir requires a prescription.
|
| I know my personal opinions about this are unusual,
| statistically speaking, but I think the pendulum has swung far
| too far in the other direction since the 1930s. It's
| frustrating to me that debates in the US are often framed in
| terms of two extremes, one resembling what we have, which is
| broken, and another where there's no safety oversight at all,
| as if those are the only options.
|
| I personally feel like the FDA should concern itself with
| regulating the characterization of basic safety profiles of
| substances, and with product purity and truth in labeling.
| Outside of that, it seems like you start getting into rent-
| seeking.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I was hoping for a new Elixir module or something
| Maultasche wrote:
| I had a similar reaction: "What a strange name for an Elixir
| library!"
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The whole story of the development of the sulfa drugs is pretty
| eye-opening, and is well-told in this popsci history book by
| Thomas Hager (2006), which also covers this toxic poisoning
| episode:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon_Under_the_Microscope
|
| One fascinating aspect of this is that Bayer originally tried to
| convince the world that their patented derivative of sulfonamide,
| Prontosil (note nitrogenous ring additive) was the one that
| worked.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prontosil
|
| It turned out that the non-patentable sulfanilamide was the
| actual active species, which Bayer probably knew but kept secret
| because, well, patents and market share and so on:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfanilamide
| chasil wrote:
| There is a chapter about this in "The Disappearing Spoon."
|
| It's this one: "Chapter 10. Take two elements, call me in the
| morning"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disappearing_Spoon
| kristofferR wrote:
| For people interested in this stuff, I recommend checking out
| Patrick Kelly on YouTube, his videos about medical history are
| amazing:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/PatrickKellyMedicalHistory
|
| This is the video containing the story about Sulfaninamide:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vuhi1SR8Zuk
| TomMasz wrote:
| It's not clear they even tested to see if it worked at all, they
| just assumed it would based on the main ingredient and moved on.
| gus_massa wrote:
| It's a good assumption. If one thing is an antibiotic and the
| other is not toxic, you can assume that the mix will be an
| antibiotic. Perhaps the solvent will cause the antibiotic to be
| absorbed slower or faster. Perhaps the solvent will cause the
| antibiotic to be eliminated slower or faster. So you may need
| to adjust the dose, or the time between takes.
|
| There are cases where the solvent will react with the
| antibiotic, and there are corner cases of weird interactions.
| Some can be predicted from general chemical rules, but some are
| unexpected.
|
| So instead of mixing random stuff and following advice of
| morons like me in the internet, it's better to ask a real
| medical doctor and a pharmacologist, and make some animal and
| clinical trial anyway.
| onychomys wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapefruit%E2%80%93drug_intera.
| ..
| foobarian wrote:
| Those times were pretty wild. Just bottle up random chemicals
| and cross fingers. Boy am I glad for the FDA.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-30 23:01 UTC)