An Ontario MP whose daughter's death was blamed on a now-discontinued prescription medication is in Vancouver to fight for an independent drug safety agency.
Oakville, Ont. MP Terence Young's daughter died suddenly at the age of 15 in March 2000. He says it was an ordinary Saturday evening for his family that saw his daughter baking cookies while he and his wife returned from a shopping trip.
"I went into my study and she came downstairs to negotiate the evening's activities, as 15-year-olds do, and jumped up and fell down on the carpet, dead. Her heart had stopped and she never regained consciousness," Young recalled to CTV's Canada AM Monday.
Young's daughter, who was bulimic, had been taking a medication called cisapride, sold as Prepulsid, on and off for about 18 months to help relieve her symptoms of bloating.
A coroner's inquest found Vanessa's bulimia along with the medication led to heart arrhythmia and caused her heart attack.
Young began investigating Prepulsid and found that Health Canada had issued five warnings about the drug before Vanessa's death, and yet doctors were still prescribing it.
It was pulled off the market in the U.S. three days after Young's death after the deaths of 80 people were attributed to the drug. It was later pulled in Canada as well.
Young sued the maker of Prepulsid, Janssen-Ortho Inc., a division of Johnson & Johnson, and eventually settled out of court. But the former MPP says the event catapulted him to return to politics to fight for change.
Since becoming an MP in 2008, Young has been on a mission to raise public awareness about medication safety, complaining that bad drugs are still being approved and used by Canadians every day.
"Nothing significant has changed since Vanessa died. There are dangerous drugs on the market right now, because regulators still aren't issuing proper safety warnings," Young said.
"Twenty-two prescription drugs that Health Canada and the pharmaceutical industry told us were safe to our families have been taken off the market since 1997 for injuring and killing patients."
This week, Young is in Vancouver to speak at a conference in support of Therapeutics Initiative, a unit of the University of British Columbia, which provides independent reviews of medications and informs the B.C government on which drugs to cover under PharmaCare.
"It does superb, evidence-based work on prescription drugs. I think it's the best source in Canada of evidence-based safety information on prescription drugs," Young said.
The province wants to abandon the group in favour of what critics say will be an industry-controlled process involving people with financial ties to the drug industry.
Young wants to prevent the B.C. government from cutting funding to the group. As well, he's introduced a private member's motion to take the medication regulatory authority away from Health Canada, which he says has "done a dismal job of protecting Canadians."
Instead, he'd like to see an independent drug agency that's similar to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission or the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, independent of industry.
Only that kind of group would "truly protect Canadians," Young says.
Source:http://www.ctv.ca/
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