The Toronto Star (which years ago, broke the story of the Motherisk tragedy when the silence of all other media outlets protected those who had harmed patients) has done it again.
In a two-part expose Rachel Mendleson writes about the widespread prescription from 2009 to 2015 of UNLICENSED deferiprone to patients at the University Health Network. This is an ongoing scandal, with ongoing potential harms to patients.
When I brought my concerns about patient safety to officials at the University Health Network, they did not stop the use of the unlicensed drug.
So, I went to the patients’ medical records. Here is that story.
This is also the story of how I was fired: how deferiprone began to be widely prescribed at UHN; of the financial support provided to UHN and UHN doctors by Barry Sherman (Apotex) who was hoping to sell deferiprone in Canada; how Dr. Brenda Gallie and I raised concerns for years (with serial UHN CEOs and the UHN Board of Trustees); and how we were ignored, also for years.
This first article also details how after an internal inquiry (described here as a “farce”) in UHN declared that the switching of 70 patients from licensed, first-line therapy to unlicensed deferiprone was “standard of care” despite the fact that 17% of patients developed diabetes and 65% experienced liver injury.
We allege that when Health Canada approved the blood disease drug deferiprone, it relied in part on data from a University Health Network program that harmed patients, and may have violated federal guidelines on the use of unlicensed medications.
The reports filed before deferiprone was approved do not account for hundreds of adverse reactions to the drug experienced by many more patients that Dr. Brenda Gallie and I documented in the following paper :
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30811439/
Eight years after Health Canada licensed deferiprone, a Star investigation has confirmed that Apotex’s licensing application included evidence from UHN patients. That acknowledgment comes amid continued secrecy from UHN and has rekindled questions about the potential influence Big Pharma funding has inside trusted Toronto health institutions.