Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Feb 8, 2012, 7:55 am
The number of dead in the wake of the substandard medicines disaster in Pakistan continues to rise with approximately 140 patients killed. Another 50 are not expected to survive. The product involved was isosorbide mononitrate tablets, commonly used in heart failure and angina, which was provided fr...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Feb 6, 2012, 12:16 pm
I’ve recently finished Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test, which is an absolutely brilliant quirky journalistic journey through Broadmoor, Scientology and DSM IV. He had an interesting Guardian article on DIY science published on Friday. He interviewed the guy who attempted to split the atom in hi...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Feb 6, 2012, 10:50 am
Last September the NHS’s flagship IT project was finally allowed to sink into the Davy Jones locker of the last government’s IT failures, after warnings from Private Eye , the BMA, and even contractors associated with it. It cost over £12 billion. Even now, some companies may be sucked into the...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Feb 6, 2012, 6:49 am
Another addition to the occasional series on nail gun accidents. A nice X-ray at the link: Luptak, 45, of Bismarck, N.D., was working on a house last week when he accidentally shot himself in the head with a nail gun, sending the nail 3 inches into his skull. As he lay on the floor, he
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Jan 28, 2012, 2:00 am
Modern day drug safety in developed countries does not generally involve poor product quality. This isn’t to say problems don’t arise, the FDA and MHRA had to shut Chiron’s vaccine plant in Liverpool for some time. Followers of the MHRA Drug Alerts service will also be aware of the drug recall...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Jan 27, 2012, 6:10 am
The news that the diagnosis of autism may be brought forward is primarily of importance because it may help identify children who will require specialised support. However, it is also interesting because it breaks the co-incidental temporal association that has been part of the reason the MMR vaccin...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Jan 21, 2012, 6:25 pm
I have been failing in my attempts to document the harms of nail guns in human bodies. Hard as Nails No 9 was way back in 2008, and started in 2004. Here is the latest case. Man did not notice nail in brain. Dante Autullo, 34, was in his workshop when a nail gun recoiled
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 29, 2011, 12:56 am
This week I have been at the International Society of Pharmacovigilance‘s 2011 meeting in Istanbul. My colleagues and I have been presenting data on missed doses (adults and children), causality and prevention of adverse drug reactions, the use of rivaroxoban for total knee replacement, and patien...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 25, 2011, 5:10 pm
Drotrecogin alfa (Xigris) has been withdrawn from the market, because it doesn’t work. It was granted a licence in the full knowledge that insufficient data existed for a standard licence, and was under yearly review by the European Medicines Agency. It was restricted for use in those with severe ...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 18, 2011, 2:59 pm
Depressing news that three people have passed away following the ingestion the old quack remedy of Gerin Oil: At least three people in London with HIV have died after they stopped taking life saving drugs on the advice of their Evangelical Christian pastors. The women died after attending churches i...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 18, 2011, 9:07 am
Here is the key part of the NICE appraisal document on prolonged release exenatide: Exenatide prolonged-release suspension for injection in triple therapy regimens (in combination with metformin and a sulphonylurea, or metformin and a thiazolidinedione) is recommended as a treatment option for peopl...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 5, 2011, 8:15 pm
Steve Jobs was a remarkable man. He leaves this universe after a resurgence of his pancreatic cancer, which he hoped he had avoided. Here are his thoughts on death from his 2005 Stanford address
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 21, 2011, 6:46 pm
On Sunday I’ll be running the Berlin Marathon for the second time. It will be my 4th marathon in 12 months. I finished Berlin last September in 4:34, and felt pretty good at the end. I make no pretence to be a good runner, I am a plodder, but the having the threat of a
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 21, 2011, 6:12 pm
I had a letter in tonight’s edition of the Evening Standard (21st September 2011, Page 49) , which isn’t easy to link to using the Evening Standard’s E-edition. It was in response to Jenni Russell’s piece. Here’s the text. Some, who deserted Labour, may now regret their support for the Lib...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 18, 2011, 6:30 pm
Hugely impressed by Ben Goldacre’s Nerdy Day Trips site. This summer I visited Alnwick Castle, where Harry Potter learnt to fly his broomstick, and The Poison Garden in the nearby gardens were well worth a visit. Here’s the nerdy link.
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 16, 2011, 12:46 pm
This week I was at the British Science Festival speaking to the motion that “This house believes that the same level of evidence should be applied to CAM as applies to conventional treatment”. Although the debate was about CAM, the fact we had two homeopaths opposing the motion did mean the focu...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 8, 2011, 7:07 pm
The title of this post is a slightly inflammatory shortened version of a motion I’ll be debating at the British Science Festival in Bradford next week. The actual motion will be: “This house believes that the same level of evidence should be applied to CAM as applies to conventional treatment”...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 4, 2011, 5:00 am
Just a note to say that the contact details for this site include an email address. Do to a server error this mailbox has not been working correctly, but is now. If you have emailed over the past few weeks, that explains my lack of response. I’ll catch up the next few days.
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 2, 2011, 8:44 am
This blog has been slightly lacking in posts over the past few months, but I’ve decided to throw some coal in the fire and get some steam pumping out the cobwebs. First up, is the red tabard story that turned up in the Telegraph last week. Christine Odone cited it as an example of death
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - May 9, 2011, 9:40 am
Why do people want to believe the Liberal Democrats are so fluffy? There is a certain view that the Liberal Democrats rolled over on NHS reform, letting the rapacious Tory party get its evil way with the NHS. There is another view, that the Liberal Democrats are victims being used to absorb all the ...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Mar 12, 2011, 4:38 pm
While outlining the evidence to support de-branding cigarette packaging, Ben Goldacre draws attention to the Unite union’s statement opposing the move. Switching to plain packaging will make it easier to sell their illicit and unregulated products especially to young people. That would undermine t...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Jan 27, 2011, 4:00 am
Congratulations to Matthew Robinson, whose excellent blog Prescribing Advice for GPs has reached the milestone of 1000 posts. Matthew’s focused blog has relentlessly and consistently posted items of interest to prescribers for over five years. If you are a Prescriber, or are interested in prescrib...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Jan 25, 2011, 8:53 am
Keith Flett, London Socialist Historians Group, makes a point about Henry the VIII’s beard in the debate about history teaching at the Guardian letters page: There are clearly limits to what can be taught, but knowing when the French revolution, American civil war and Russian revolution were is mo...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Jan 22, 2011, 7:31 pm
As a brief follow-up to this story, here’s some shock news from Science about the Nobel Prize winner. Virologist and Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier announced earlier this month that, at age 78, he will take on the leadership of a new research institute at Jiaotong University in Shanghai. What has s...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Jan 20, 2011, 8:51 pm
Over the past three weeks the BMJ has been publishing Brian Deer‘s investigation of Wakefield’s fraudulent attempt to make money out of manufactured safety concerns about MMR. The first BMJ article dealt with the fixing of the data, the second dealt with plans to reap financial rewards from Wake...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Dec 7, 2010, 9:14 am
Today Julian Assange was arrested, and in the past few days wikileaks servers had to be moved and their financial accounts have been frozen. There is also internal dissent, with some arguing that far too much focus has been placed on Assange, and on the international leaks that Assange argues are me...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Nov 30, 2010, 4:43 am
The safety of newly marketed drugs is always provisional, based on the relatively limited population the drugs are used in prior to marketing. The number of subjects who take a drug in clinical trials is large enough to detect efficacy, but too small to detect rare, but serious, adverse events. In a...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Nov 22, 2010, 12:01 pm
This summer the Nobel Prizewinner, Luc Montagnier, seemed to lend credibility to homeopathy. French virologist Luc Montagnier stunned his colleagues at a prestigious international conference when he presented a new method for detecting viral infections that bore close parallels to the basic tenets o...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Nov 18, 2010, 3:13 am
The media are forever publishing stories that are mildly entertaining on one level, but when examined more closely are barely based on any facts at all. A year ago, Martin Robbins published a blogpost tracking a news story which correlated IQ with breast size and which had recently appeared in an In...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Nov 17, 2010, 7:01 pm
A few years ago, there was concern that pharmaceutical companies were not sufficiently interested in the development of licenced drugs for rare (or “orphan”) medical conditions. Experience in the US and Japan suggested that legislation to encourage pharmaceutical manufacturers to become involved...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Nov 16, 2010, 2:36 am
Over 4 years ago I posted on the use of NovoSeven (recombinant activated Factor VIIa
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 13, 2010, 6:32 am
The BBC’s Democracy Live have put up the EU debate on pharmacovigilance. Interestingly, one of the outcomes is some legal backing to a black symbol, with the statement “This medicinal product is subject to additional monitoring.” In the UK, that is the black triangle. I hope it doesn’t chang...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 12, 2010, 3:23 pm
Any treatment that ameliorates cancer, never mind cure it, is good news. Unequivocally. However, sometimes you have to wonder at the way in which information about new cancer treatments hits the public. First a paper is presented at a conference. Abiraterone increases median survival in currently un...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 10, 2010, 2:18 pm
More news on the impact of cutting science funding: The forthcoming report from Research Councils UK will warn that a cut in £1 billion in the amount of funding they can provide for scientific research would lead to a fall in GDP of more than £10 billion. It will argue that public investment in sc...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 9, 2010, 5:53 pm
If you haven’t signed the Science is Vital petition, please do. Today, hundreds of scientists protested in London about the scale of proposed cuts to science funding. Other developed nations know the long-term consequences of cutting science funding far outweigh the short-term gains of cuts. S...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 9, 2010, 5:24 pm
A few years ago I was lucky enough to meet Christopher Hitchens at the Hay Festival, the great writer and intellectual of our time. Sadly, while promoting his biography, Hitch 22, in which he muses on a false report of his death, he was taken ill and diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. In his
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 7, 2010, 6:01 pm
Asks Andre Picard in the Globe and Mail. The answer is “no”. Canada and the US arguably reach for the law suit more often than Europe, but it isn’t clear that drug safety in Europe is any less effective for that. For example, despite the difference in culture, it is the US that has...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 5, 2010, 9:43 am

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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Oct 1, 2010, 11:39 am
Just a short note. A couple of years ago there was a great deal of fuss about paracetamol and a possible link with asthma in children
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 30, 2010, 11:02 am
Oliver James is often called on to pontificate on psychological or mental health issues by the media. I’ve previously mentioned him on this blog, when he suggested up to 80% of the population were mentally ill, and that abuse during childhood, and living in a “sick” society, led pe...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 27, 2010, 7:38 pm
The marathon journey is over! A while back I posted my targets for the Berlin marathon: Dream goal: Under 4:30 in good shape. Challenging Target: 4:30 in any shape. Acceptable goal: Finishing. In the end, I finished in 4:34 in reasonable shape, with fairly even splits. So, I’m 4 minutes off my...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 23, 2010, 3:44 am
One of the issues this blog covered from 2004 to 2007 was the Benghazi Six. The posts are here. In summary, 5 Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were accused of deliberately infecting children with HIV, and after a five year trial sentenced to death by firing squad. It was suggested that fore...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 16, 2010, 6:04 pm
How running changed one man’s life.
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 15, 2010, 1:20 pm
One of the Pope’s senior advisors (not God, but a German Cardinal, Walter Kasper) has given his opinion on the UK immediately prior to the Pontiff’s arrival. “when you land at Heathrow you think at times you have landed in a Third World country” The apology is worse than the ...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 14, 2010, 6:07 pm
An interesting paper in PLOS Medicine on media reporting of medical news. Wilson et al examined medical news stories written by specialist and non-specialist journalists in Australia from 2004–08. They found specialist health reporters produced higher quality articles than general reporters, and b...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 13, 2010, 10:34 am
It is now only 13 days until the Berlin marathon, and I thought I’d give a brief update on my progress during training. Since I started training proper I have run 379 miles; my highest mileage week was 41 miles including a 20 mile long run. I now have only 30 miles of training left
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Sep 4, 2010, 6:24 am

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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Aug 24, 2010, 5:20 am
When writing a scientific paper, one task during the process of submitting the paper is to gather up the conflicts of interest so that readers can judge if they may have introduced bias into your paper. They may not have, but all the same it is the general view that providing such information is imp...
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - Jul 12, 2010, 7:01 pm
This isn’t a post in which I am going to set out my views on the NHS White Paper issued today, I’ve only skimmed it. I am going to note in passing that some people have failed to pay attention to what the coalition parties, with a particular focus on the Liberal Democrats, were saying
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Anthony C. posted an article on Black Triangle - May 28, 2010, 8:31 am
Wakefield lessons: Economist, Spiked on-line
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