Canada regulating pharmaceuticals badly
Canada’s health ministry is not regulating pharmaceutical drugs well enough and is slow to address potential safety issues when it identifies them, an official watchdog reported on Tuesday. Interim Auditor General John Wiersema said Health Canada sometimes takes more than two years to complete an assessment of the risks of drugs already on the market.
It also said the department had not yet figured out what measures were needed to address the potential for conflicts of interest in its reviews of drug submissions. “Health Canada has not adequately fulfilled its key responsibilities for monitoring the safety of marketed drugs,” the report said. There are about 13,000 prescription and nonprescription drugs on a Canadian market that was worth around C$28 billion ($26.9 billion) in 2008.
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