The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "U.S. Food and Drug Administration" ...
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"Mercury taints skin lighteners"
The Tribune decided to investigate a tip found in a New York Times story that suggested mercury might be present in certain beauty products. The Tribune tested 50 different skin-lightening creams purchased from various locations around Chicago and found that six contained enough mercury to be banned by federal law. When used over time, mercury can be cause health problems, including kidney damage.
Tags: mercury; skin-lightening cream; U.S. Food and Drug Administration; FDA; FOIA; Mercury Policy Project; EcoWaste Coalition
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Dangerous Remedy
Robert Little of The (Baltimore) Sun reported that the U.S. Army has injected over 1000 soldiers wounded in Iraq with a medicine designed for hemophiliacs despite the fact that it is dangerous for people with normal blood. It can give them blood clots that could cause strokes and heart attacks. It costs $6000 per dose. Civilian doctors "have largely rejected it as a standard treatment for trauma patients." Army doctors say, in their experience, the drug saves lives by stopping hemorrhaging. Little says “Doctors in Iraq's emergency rooms, however, almost never care for their patients long enough to see firsthand whether blood clots or other complications have developed." Little reports that "the drug has never been subjected to a large-scale clinical trial to verify that it works and is safe for patients without hemophilia."
Tags: military medical system; Iraq; coagulant; Institute for Surgical Research; Germany; military hospitals; Food and Drug Administration; FDA; U.S. Department of Defense; DoD; Marines; Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs; U.S. Army Surgeon General; HIPPA; actionable intelligence; Recombinant Activated Factor VII; Novo Nordisk; coagulopathic bleeding;
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Hidden Risks, Lethal Truths
This story was initially reported in June of 2000, when the dangerous effects of the diabetes pill, Rezulin, were first discovered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The pill, which was found to cause liver-related deaths in patients, was finally taken off the market in March 2000 after bringing in $2.1 billion in sales for Warner-Lambert Co. This investigation looks at internal documents which uncover Warner-Lambert executives hid early indications of the drug's effects from regulators. The documents also indicate that the company put off sharing the information with family doctors prescribing the medicine with their patients.
Tags: Warner-Lambert Co; Rezulin; federal regulation; Food and Drug Administration; Pfizer; Inc.; drugs
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CR Investigates: Dangerous Supplements Still at Large
"This article documented the continuing availability in the U.S. of nutritional supplements that are drugs in all but name, and are capable of causing serious side effects including death. We showed how easy it was to obtain the 12 most dangerous of these products by making purchases ourselves in retail stores and on the Internet. We then examined how loopholes and lax enforcement of supplement regulatory laws in the U.S. have allowed purveyors of these hazardous products to flourish. We also examined and debunked the widely held belief that supplements are safe because they're 'natural.'"
Tags: nutrition; Food and Drug Administration; dietary supplements
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Are these diet pills deadly?
Glamour reports on a decade-long lack of action by the FDA against the drug ephedra. The writers charge the drug industry with stalling the government on both state and federal levels. The story also exposes the ways in which some manufacturers purportedly proved their products were safe and effective, documenting how little research had ever been done on ephedra-based supplements and debunking the single study most often cited by the industry. The story also talks about how marketers continued to use flimsy evidence to make claims about their products efficacy....claims that were unanimously voted to be false and scientifically impossible by the Federal Trade Commission.
Tags: ephedra; diet supplements; U.S. Food and Drug Administration; ephedra-based supplements; Federal Trade Commission; Rand Corporation; Health and Human Services; herbal supplement; FDA; National Football League; National Collegiate Athletic Association; American Medical Association; consumer-advocacy groups; Xenadrine; Hydroxycut; Metabolife International Inc.; Metabolife; fen-phen; Dietary supplement Health and Education Act; DSHEA; Public Citizen's Health Research Group; Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders; diet pill; Ephedra Education Council; AER; adverse event report; Center for Drug Evaluation and Research
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Hepatitis C: Silent Alarm
This series documented the government's numerous failures to warn the American public about hepatitis C, a disease that has infected more than 4 million people in the United States. The series found that the federal government promised repeatedly to raise a public alarm about the disease but reneged almost every time. As a result, most people with hepatitis C don't even know they have it and may be spreading it. The series also found that Congress and CDC give hepatitis C a fraction of the funding and attention they give other disease such as West Nile, that has killed several hundreds. The government promised a search to find nearly two hundred thousand patients who received infected blood transfusions before 1992, when a test was available to screen out infected blood, but four years later, the campaign had stalled. The blood industry in the 1980's delayed a screening test six years that could have prevented hepatitis C in more than 300,000 patients who received blood transfusions. the government never ordered the test even though it was aware of the seriousness of the disease.
Tags: hepatitis c; virus; AIDS; public alarm; Congress; Center for Disease Control and Prevention; HCV; funding; West Nile; infected blood transfusions; infected blood; blood industry; screening test; donated blood; CDC; CDC spending; HCV money; National Institute of Health; Health and Human Services; U.S. Food and Drug Administration; FDA's Office of Blood Research and Review; Blood Products Advisory Committee; Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability; blood banks; Community Blood Center of Kansas City; Oklahoma Blood Institute
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The Rise and Fall of the Killer Drug Rezulin
The Los Angeles Times explains how "a disparate collection of physicians inside the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ... combined research and bluntly worded e-mails" to convince their superiors to pull Rezulin, a pill fast-tracked by the FDA that was causing liver failure in patients. It took 90 deaths from the blood-sugar medication before the FDA and manufacturer Warner-Lambert Co. took action.
Tags: Rezulin; Food and Drug Administration; FDA; Warner-Lambert Co.; drugs; fast track
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Blood Errors
The series -- the result of an intensive Freedom of Information battle with the Food and Drug Administration -- "was two-pronged: an initial (three-part) series found hundreds of hospital patients across the U.S. had died following blood transfusions. The investigation found that "hospital labs mislabeled blood, nurses transfused it into the wrong patients, phlebotomists drew blood samples from the wrong people and, in some cases, deadly contaminated blood was transfused into patients." A secondary investigation "developed as an offshoot of the series. A special blood plasma made on Long Island and sold by the American Red Cross to thousands of hospitals was killing liver transplant patients." Newsday documented 16 deaths in liver transplant patients and found that the plasma was deficient in a crucial protein, making it especially dangerous to people with liver disease.
Tags: blood; hospitals; medicine; American Red Cross; transfusions; Long Island; plasma; Food and Drug Administration; FDA; FOIA; database mapping project
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FDA and Drug Safety
A CBS investigative series reports on different aspects of dangerous medicine. Some of the reports reveal that the managed care has gone out of control. "Health insurance giants ... are harming patients by denying crucial medical care, illegally denying and delaying claims, and using unfair and deceptive trade practices." Insurers also "downcode" doctors' claims - that is, change them to services that pay less or nothing at all. Other stories look at the risks posed by drug studies and the lack of enough oversight from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). One of the reports tells how a healthy baby died after being enrolled in a study of Propulsid, a heartburn drug that turned out to be dangerous and has been repeatedly rejected by the FDA for pediatric use. The series also examine cases of prescription drugs that should have never been sold, and concludes that FDA has become too close to the pharmaceutical industry. A major finding is that pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. have huge financial incentives to keep dangerous drugs on the market at the cost of patients' deaths and injuries.
Tags: TAPE; TRANSCRIPT; medicine; HMOs; health care; patients; Cigna; Oxford; Connecticare; Aetna; Physician Health Services; Anthem Bule Cross/Blue Shield; Rezulin; Pfeizer; Warner Lambert
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Danger at the drugstore
A study by U.S. News in cooperation with Georgetown University School of Medicine reveals that pharmacists are failing to protect patients against dangerous interactions of prescription drugs. One of the major findings is that many pharmacists who participated in the study did not alert consumers to the potentially lethal interaction between a common antihistamine and an antifungal drug. Indianapolis pharmacists proved to be the most cautious, while in Denver more than half failed to alert customers about the risky interaction. The story describes several most common potentially dangerous interactions, or such that can weaken the efficacy of at least one of the drugs taken at the same time. Because of the profit-oriented pricing structures of the managed-care companies, today's pharmacists have little incentive to judge and report the clinical significance of the side effect of prescription drugs, the magazine reports.
Tags: doctors; patients; oral contraceptives; birth control; Hismanal; Nizoral; Food and Drug Administration (FDA)