“The gas cart was filled to the brim with pigs today, a total of 39, including 9 large pigs that were at weaning age. They were left in the cart all day to trample each other, before being gassed all at once.”

Read the diary and watch the video of undercover investigator Mike who worked at the Country View/Hatfield Quality Meats hog farm last spring and you’re sure laws are being broken and the operation will be shut down. Wrong. There is nothing illegal in one of the most gruesome videos to circulate the Web says Mercy For Animals (MFA) who conducted the investigation, because there are no farm welfare laws to break.

As the anti-factory farming movement gains momentum, many have heard about gestation crates, enclosures so small sows can’t turn around, that are banned in the European Union and some states. They have heard of tail docking and castration without anesthesia–also banned in some European countries–manure lagoons, dead piles and animals that go cage crazy from their confinement.

But who knew the euthanasia of unwanted piglets and their mothers was so primitive?

Video shows whimpering, seven pound piglets still breathing and blinking at the bottom of the death cart after being gassed with carbon dioxide hours earlier. “32 starve-outs, 16 runts, 10 ruptures, 9 poor quality, 3 deformed and 2 joint infections” were killed in five days writes Mike, who was hired to work as a barn technician last May.

Who knew shooting an animal with a captive bolt pistol — designed to catastrophically damage the cerebrum, part of the cerebellum, upon penetrating the cranium — might work and then again might not? “My supervisor told me she was dubbing my coworker ‘Two-Shot’ in light of the fact he rarely kills the sow with one bolt,” says Mike.

Working in a hot, fly and manure infested hog barn amid screams of 2,784 sows, 483 sows with litters, 864 gilts, 5,400 nursery pigs and 15 boars could make anyone snap. But some of the workers sound snapped before working at Country View.

One told Mike he prays to run over animals on the highway and was looking forward to bolting a prolapsed sow because “I just feel like killing something.” Another worker swung a ruptured pig into the gas cart telling it with glee to “die, %#@&,” employing a racial epithet.

Veterinarians viewing the Country View video cite disturbing violations of their profession’s oath.

“There are dead piglets in the farrowing crates, and one moribund piglet is captured on video in her last minutes of life,” says Illinois veterinarian Debra Teachout. “She is in trembling and in lateral recumbency, respirations are shallow and gasping, eye is swollen and shut. There is a large lesion on her face, and suggests that she is dying of sepsis. This piglet should never have been allowed to get to this point without medical intervention.”

“The pig seizuring in the stall unattended is nightmarish, as is the sloppy use of the captive bolt,” says Bernard Rollin, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University and Pew Commission member. “The gas ‘euthanasia’ using CO2 is widespread in the industry. It is horrendous, as the animals suffocate and experience major fear and distress.”

Nor is it possible to overlook the animals’ intelligence, says Mike who found a sow had liberated herself and her litter from her crate by loosening steel pegs in two different places. “I told a co-worker this story and she said that when a sow figures out how to unlock her crate, she often goes around unlocking all of the other crates as well,” wrote Mike.

Pigs also can jump hoops, bow, stand, spin, “speak” on command, roll out a rug, herd sheep, play videogames and use mirrors to find food, reports New York Times science columnist Natalie Angier. They “like being touched and petted,” says Mike.

Like the poultry and egg farms it has investigated, the choice of Country View/Hatfield Quality Meats at 12722 Creek Road in Fannettsburg, PA was random–and the practices recorded, universal across the industry, says Chicago-based Mercy For Animals. Hatfield is one of the nation’s top pork providers and supplies Wal-Mart, IGA Shaw’s, Stop & Shop, Sam’s, Club, Costco, Giant and other well known food chains.

“We are calling on the nation’s largest grocery chains to take a stand against egregious cruelty to animals,” says MFA executive director Nathan Runkle. “These companies have the power and the responsibility to ensure that the products sold on their shelves come from producers who have abandoned the abusive practices uncovered in our investigation.”

Did your doctor pass, Bipolar Disorder: Individualizing Treatment to Improve Patient Outcomes, Part 2 “taught” by Trisha Suppes, MD, PhD and offered by CME Outfitters?

Suppes is a Professor in Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science and funded by Abbott, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Novartis, Pfizer, Wyeth, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Shire and four more pharma companies.

Maybe your doctor passed Quadrivalent HPV Vaccine May Be Effective in Women 24 to 45 Years Old–which sounds like a sales pitch for Gardasil because it is–which “studies” a Lancet article written by Nubia Munoz, MD, two Merck employees and other authors.

Sample question: “What was the main conclusion of the current study by Munoz and colleagues of HPV vaccine among women between the ages of 24 and 45 years?” (Italics CME’s) Hint: the answer is in the title.

Upon “completion on this activity” offered by CME giant Medscape–still available for credit if you hurry–participants will be able to: “Specify the currently recommended age range for the administration of the quadrivalent human papillomavirus vaccine” and “Describe the effects of the quadrivalent human papillomavirus vaccine among women between the ages of 24 and 45 years.”

Maybe your doctor passed Medscape’s Innovative Approaches to Vaccination Challenges: Overcoming Barriers for Adult Patients sponsored by vaccine makers Novartis, GSK and Merck and referring to sales barriers.

CMEs, continuing medical education courses, are sponsored by pharma, “taught” by pharma funded specialists and bracketed by pop-up drugs ads which sometimes occlude the text you’re reading. (”Which of the following manic symptoms are most seriously impacting your bipolar patients’ lives?” asked a disease-baiting ad for Geodon, direct-to-consumer style, when we looked at a CME.) Yet doctors are required to sit through the canned message like a time-share presentation and answer a quiz just to keep their state licenses and sometimes insurance policies.

In fact the only good thing doctors have to say about CMEs is they are hard to fail–”second chance” questions pop up if you miss the first ones; whew!–and they are often free. Why?

CMEs are supposed to be monitored by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) but like Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s stock ratings funding comes from the client side so buyer beware.

Last year Bernard Carroll, MD a former chairman of psychiatry at Duke, challenged the objectivity of a CME Outfitters course called Atypical Antipsychotics in Major Depressive Disorder: When Current Treatments Are Not Enough (what are they trying to say?) funded by Seroquel maker AstraZeneca and taught by disgraced Emory University psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff, MD who lost his department chairmanship from unreported pharma income.

Two doses of Seroquel were tested, but only the results of one were “statistically significant,” writes Carroll on a blog called Health Care Renewal. “One of the junior presenters stated very clearly that there was ’significant improvement in both response and remission with both doses’ of Seroquel. That is a falsification of the scientific record.”

In October AstraZeneca agreed to pay $520 million to settle Seroquel suits and investigations of “physicians who participated in clinical trials involving Seroquel,” presumably on which safety was established, and a JAMA article red flags Seroquel’s metabolic proclivities in which studied children gained a pound a week and more. Yet AstraZeneca still seeks FDA approval to market Seroquel to kids.

Nor did the April 2009 article about Seroquel, “Maintenance Treatment For Patients With Bipolar I Disorder: Results From A North American Study Of Quetiapine In Combination With Lithium Or Divalproex” in the American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP) by CME presenter Trisha Suppes fare well.

Why were two-thirds of pre-randomization patients discontinued because of “lack of therapeutic response, developing an adverse event” and being lost to follow-up ask Debasish Basu, MD, and Kaustav Chakraborty, MD from Chandigarh, India in the October AJP? “Could it be possible that the remaining patients, who did eventually proceed to the randomization phase, represented a group favorably predisposed to the quetiapine combination?”

A second letter in the same AJP echoes the methodology questions. “Only one-third of the patients were selected for maintenance therapy, which raises the possibility of selection bias,” write Bettahalasoor S. Somashekar, MD, DPM, Ashok Kumar Jainer, MD, MRCP and Wajid Shafi, MD from Coventry, UK. “In this regard, Healy [David Healy, MD, Cardiff University professor] stated that company sponsored clinical trials invariably recruit samples of convenience, which by definition do not actually sustain extrapolation to normal clinical practice.”

Similar methodology questions are raised about the “science” behind Medscape’s Quadrivalent HPV Vaccine May Be Effective in Women 24 to 45 Years Old CME in the October 10 Lancet.

Why did Munoz et al. exclude women “with pre-existing infections and women who do not complete the full course of the vaccine,” ask six researchers with US National Cancer Institute. Is this also a sample of convenience? And why was “infection of 6 month duration or longer” used as an endpoint for showing a public health cancer benefit asks a different set of researchers, Stefanie Schenk and Jutta Halbekath from Berlin–when no “differentiation” between infection and cancer is given?

Clearly the letter writers need to do their CMEs.

Last week, the Times blasted California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for downgrading a scheduled Pollan lecture because it received pressure from David E. Wood, a university donor who happens to be chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co.

“Agribusiness gets plenty of opportunities to preach its point of view at agriculture schools such as Cal Poly, where the likes of Monsanto and Cargill fund research,” the Times wrote, calling the 800-acre Harris Ranch, near Coalinga, whose “smell assaults passersby long before the panorama of thousands of cattle packed atop layers of their own manure,”–”Cowschwitz.” Ouch.

And agribusiness has the University of Wisconsin-Madison to deal with.

The land grant, ag-based university, in the middle of dairyland, clearly doesn’t remember its roots. It gave Pollan’s In Defense of Food, another anti-agbiz screed according to industry, free to all incoming freshmen as part of its common book read program where everyone reads the same book, Go Big Read, in August.

“I have not seen the students this excited about something in years,” Irwin Goodman, horticulture professor and vice dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences told the Associated Press as the James Beard Award-winning book was discussed in French and political science classes and included in an exhibit on the history of food.

Protesting farmers who came to hear Pollan speak at the university’s 17,000-seat Kohl Center in September wearing matching green T-shirts which said “In Defense of Farming: Eat Food. Be Healthy. Thank Farmers.” were clearly outnumbered. So were bumper stickers reading No Food; No Farms and Don’t Criticize Farmers With Your Mouth Full in the parking lot.

Students get all their facts from writers like Pollan, the farmers, who were bussed in by Madison-based feed company Vita Plus, told the Capital Times. They have never visited a farm for first-hand knowledge of food production and don’t know what they’re talking about.

But efforts to open farms to the public are not always successful.

This month United Egg Producers’ “Opening the Barn Doors” media tour at Morning Fresh Farms in northern Colorado, for example, only confirmed the size of today’s egg farm that make humane conditions impossible (36 barns; 23,000 birds each, 23 million dozen eggs a year) and raised further questions about environmental blight by showing the press wearing white HazMat suits to enter the barns. (See: You want us to eat WHAT?)

Last month the American Egg Board rolled out a kid-focused “The Good Egg” campaign which includes sponsorship of Sesame Street, a Cookie Monster product placement and a feel good virtual tour to soften public opinion about egg farms. But nowhere does the campaign address the daily grinding up of newborn males even as they hatch at the hatcheries which supply egg farms to provide the industry with only females–a practice that United Egg Producers confirms is routine. Does the Cookie Monster know about that?

Nor can all that crowding and all those chemicals be good for you, Pollan has written and many studies suggest.

But agribusiness is also combating last year’s American Institute for Cancer Research and World Cancer Research Fund study that found the link between processed meats and colon cancer so strong, the organizations advised consumers to change their eating habits.

Trent Loos, an outspoken columnist with the agbiz weekly, Feedstuffs, says nitrosamines, found in processed or cured meat and widely believed carcinogenic, may actually be good for you, preventing and treating “cardiovascular and other diseases associated with nitric oxide insufficiency in the diet.”

“Nitric oxide is an important signaling molecule in the human body to regulate numerous physiological functions including blood flow to tissues and organs,” write Loos of research conducted by Dr. Nathan Bryan at the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Texas, Houston. “The regular intake of nitrite-containing food appears to ensure that blood and tissue levels of nitrite and nitric oxide pools in the body are maintained at adequate levels.”

Some of the ag press has even picked up the theory–but don’t expect a Pollan book called In Defense of Nitrites anytime soon.

It’s only been five years since Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million for seizure drug Neurontin abuses and entered into a Corporate Integrity Agreement (CIA), a trust-but-verify arrangement with the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, in 2004.

And it’s only been seven years since Pfizer agreed to pay $49 million to settle charges it defrauded Medicaid by overcharging for cholesterol drug Lipitor and entered into another CIA in 2002.

Pfizer’s fraud settlement for pain drug Bextra, withdrawn in 2004, antipsychotic Geodon, seizure drug Lyrica and antibiotic Zyvox is the largest pharmaceutical fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice — and the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the United States.

More than 10,000 postal employees on workers compensation were treated with Bextra, Geodon, Lyrica and Zyvox says Joseph Finn, Special Agent in Charge for the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General. Forty-three states will share in the givebacks.

But it’s the same off-label and kickback tango — causing “false claims to be submitted to government health care programs,” also known as our tax dollars — Pfizer has been charged with before.

For example, Florida’s Medicaid program paid $935,584 for illegal Geodon pediatric prescriptions in 2005 — illegal because Geodon is not approved for children — and Texas’s Medicaid program paid $557,256 for just two months of pediatric Geodon prescriptions, according to the complaint.

It is an irony that even as Pfizer settles the pediatric charges, the FDA is considering its petition to approve Geodon (ziprasidone) for children. Isn’t that a little after the fact?

In June, the FDA Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee recommended approval of Geodon for “the acute treatment of manic or mixed episodes associated with bipolar disorder, with or without psychotic features, in children and adolescents ages 10 to 17.”

It’s also an irony that the original safety data on which FDA rejected Geodon as a new drug in 1997 — its side effect of QT interval prolongation which can cause sudden death — are still under debate; at the June meeting, Pfizer doctors admitted to committee members that Geodon can add an extra eight heart beats a minute.

Pfizer doctors referred to the adult study 054 — as they did to convince FDA to overturn Geodon’s rejection in 2001 — and FDA doctors insisted no prior ECG should be necessary, but doctors on the panel were less convinced.

Marsha D. Rappley, MD, Dean of the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University observed that while the average increased heart beat with Geodon in the presented studies might be five to eight beats per minute, “there was 8 percent of the children or young people who had a pulse over 120. And if I had a 15-year-old who had a sustained pulse of 120, I would worry about that.”

And Christopher B. Granger, MD, Director of Duke University Medical Center’s Cardiac Care Unit and Edward L.C. Pritchett, MD, with Duke’s Cardiology and Clinical Pharmacology division focused on the fact that Geodon’s increased heart rate doesn’t indicate blood pressure is going down as with most drugs.

“You know, the interesting thing here is that the blood pressure has actually gone up, so we have the curious situation of the heart rate and the blood pressure both going up,” said Pritchett.

No one seemed reassured when Tom Tensfeldt, MD with Pfizer’s pharmacokinetics group offered, “There may be a bit of a plateau in the effect, at least on average here.” (Heart beats won’t increase ad infinitum?)

Nor were panelists reassured when Kenneth Towbin, MD, Chief of NIMH’s Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program asked about one of Pfizer’s Geodon post marketing slides, “that revealed cardiopulmonary failure and stroke in children 3 to 17.”

“We had ten reports of death in our post-marketing database in pediatric subjects. One of these subjects was a 16-year-old male who died of cardiopulmonary failure,” said Susan Anway, MD, with Pfizer safety and risk management. “The second case you referred to was a case of stroke — cerebrovascular effects — or event. This was a subject who had many other comorbidities, as well as on a number of other concomitant medications.”

Of course most children given Geodon will have the same “comorbidities” and “concomitant medications.” And thanks to Pfizer fraud the drug’s already in wide pediatric use. So if FDA approves Geodon for children it will be another Three-Peat.

Except that the kinetic yellow balls–an undulating fuzzy mass– are not pears or peppers but newborn chicks.

And they’re being sorted into male, female and deformed–with male and deformed destined for death.

A video just released by Mercy For Animals from Hy-Line Hatchery in Spencer, Iowa, the largest hatchery for egg-laying breed chicks in the U.S., confirms what has been rumored for years about the egg industry: that newborn males which are worthless to the industry are ground up alive in chopping machines called macerators.

Video from a hidden camera clearly shows healthy male chicks, peeping and bouncing as they greet the world, fed into the blades of the macerator like so much litter. Hello! Goodbye!

“I saw a bloody slush coming out of the bottom of the grinder,” writes the MFA investigator who worked in the Hy-Line “transfer room” and on the cleaning crew during May and June. “The plant manager told me that the ground-up male chicks were used in dog food and fertilizer.”

Also shown in the Mercy For Animals video is the debeaking procedure in which chicks are inserted en mass into a laser cutter where they dangle by their beaks, struggling, while burns are inflicted that make part of their beak fall off in a week.

Nor does the egg industry want to waste any time letting a chick peck its way out of its shell to start its tour of duty on the egg farm, if it’s female.

The hatchery’s “separator” machine efficiently disconnects newborns from their shells at the price of the few which fall to the ground or get caught in the machine and “washed” along with the equipment.

Asked about the panting, damp newborns on the floor, half born and half dead, a worker tells the MFA investigator, “Some of them get on the floor and get wet and then they’re no good. And those that were dumped down there were probably just dead ones that were stuck in the trays. That end of the machine is for washing the trays…if they’re stuck in there, they get washed out and that’s how come they’re in there.”

Like veal calves on dairy farms, egg industry chicks experience no moments with their mothers despite their innate biological urges. Their first memories will be of blades, pain and terror not of a mother in the mechanized hell the egg industry has devised to bring cheap product to the market.

Veterinarians have condemned the procedures shown in the video, which are both legal and accepted industry practices–including in so-called free range operations–and approved by the American Veterinary Medical Association.

“Intense pain, shock and bleeding result” from debeaking–which is done to offset the effects of crowding–and “some chicks may die outright in the process,” says Nedim C. Buyukmihci, V.M.D., Emeritus Professor of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California who has specialized in farmed animals and chickens. “There is loss of weight because the chicks are too painful or disfigured to eat properly, sometimes because the tongue is injured or severed during the process.”

Illinois veterinarian Debra Teachout agrees.

The beak is a “sensory organ” necessary not just for grasping food, but for “preening, drinking, manipulating objects in the environment, nest building and defense,” says Dr. Teachout. “As a practicing veterinarian, if I were treating a pet chicken of the same age that required a similar surgical procedure on its beak for therapeutic reasons, and I did not use anesthetics followed by pain modulation, it would be considered malpractice.”

And maceration?

In which “chicks vocalize and bounce around a few times” even as they “free fall” into the pit with the auger and are “pushed into the grinder to their death,” as Dr. Teachout describes? A fate which greets 150,000 baby males a day at the hatchery according to the MFA investigator?

It cannot be termed euthanasia, says Dr. Teachout. That term implies a “good death.”

The U.S. trade group United Egg Producers confirms the maceration–grinding up while alive–of 150,000 baby chicks daily. “There is, unfortunately, no way to breed eggs that only produce female hens,” spokesman Mitch Head tells the Associated Press. “If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, we’re happy to provide them to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need.”

At simultaneous press conferences this week in Spencer, Des Moines and Davenport, Iowa, Nathan Runkle, executive director of Chicago-based Mercy For Animals presented the video to media and called on Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway and 47 other grocery chains to affix a new label to egg cartoons:

It says “Warning: Male chicks are ground-up alive by the egg industry,” and depicts a chick atop grinding blades.

“The vast majority of Americans care deeply about farmed animal welfare issues, yet, they’re kept in the dark about the egg industry’s painful disposal of male chicks,” says Runkle. “If egg producers threw, mutilated and ground up puppies or kittens, they’d be prosecuted for cruelty to animals!”

Not only do grocery stores and consumers have an obligation to acknowledge the truth about eggs, there are many easy and delicious egg alternatives, says Runkle. “Compassionate consumers can find an assortment of mouthwatering egg-free recipes at ChooseVeg.com.”

But look for a pharma affiliation for the author of the article “Preschool Depression,” Joan L. Luby, MD in the August issue and you’ll be told no “financial disclosure” was reported. Not that “Dr. Luby has received grant/research support from Janssen, has given occasional talks sponsored by AstraZeneca, and has served as a consultant for Shire Pharmaceutical,” as a 2006 article in Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry says.

Even though the pharmaceutical industry has got 27 million Americans on antidepressants thanks to direct to consumer advertising–ten percent of the population–it is looking for depression in preschoolers. And guess what?

It’s finding it!

It’s easy to make jokes about “preschool depression”–students get it every time the alarm rings–but finding depression, “relapses,” “chronicity” and “treatment resistance” in three-year-olds is not funny.

Researchers used to believe that “young children were too cognitively and emotionally immature to experience depressive effects,” says Luby but now believe they can and do suffer from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).

“The potential public health importance of identification of preschool MDD is underscored by the established unique efficacy of early intervention during the preschool period in other childhood disorders,” says Luby. “Based in part on the recurrent course and the relative treatment resistance of childhood MDD, there has been increased interest in the identification of the disorder at the earliest possible stage of development.”

Translation: they want to screen your kid.

The case for a new social problem to be called preschool depression is so strong, there was only one real wrinkle in Ludy’s longitudinal study of 304 preschoolers, funded by our tax dollars at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Instead of having “anxiety disorders” usually associated other MDD sufferers, the three and four-year-olds had “disruptive disorders.” Possibly Play-Doh problems.

Undaunted, Luby says the preschoolers need to be screened for impending mental illness because their disruptive behavior “might be associated with social impairment and peer rejection that lead to later MDD.”

Of course cynics will point out that drinking milk also predicts MDD and that disruptive behavior is the definition of a preschooler, making terms like preschool “social impairment and peer rejection” laughable academic babble.

But more concerning is what, exactly, is the “treatment” and “intervention” for the at-risk preschooler who might develop depression? And why the hurry?

Is it treatment with Janssen and AstraZenca antipsychotic drugs in which case the MDD is really a Risperdal or Seroquel deficiency?

Like Rebecca Riley given Seroquel at two and dead at four?

And the late Destiny Hager who was given Seroquel at three?

Is the “intervention” like the two children the Miami Herald says Mirko and Regina Ceska of Crawfordville, FLA adopted from state foster care who were so doped up on antipsychotics the couple asked Gov. Charlie Crist if “chemical restraints” were “prerequisites” in foster care?

Only to have Crist’s head of the Department of Children and Families, George Sheldon, ask them to testify at the investigation into the death of foster care seven-year-old, Gabriel Myers, earlier this year, on similar drugs?

It is not a coincidence that 3,100 or 15.5 percent of the Florida’s 20,000 children in state care are on psychoactive drugs, legally prescribed or not, a figure that likely applies to other states.

Do you think private plans will pay $900 a month per patient for a branded blockbuster drug that may not even be necessary?

No wonder pharma sits in so many “advisory positions” on state formularies, tampering with drug decision algorithms.

In fact, Texas charged Janssen in December with defrauding the state of millions “with their sophisticated and fraudulent marketing scheme,” to “secure a spot for the drug, Risperdal, on the state’s Medicaid preferred drug list and on controversial medical protocols that determine which drugs are given to adults and children in state custody.”

In addition to giving trips, perks and kickbacks to Texas’ mental health officials, says the Dallas News, Janssen disguised marketing tools as scientific research “including ‘independent’ articles that were nothing of the kind.”

Imagine that.

But soon weeds began encroaching, white tailed rabbits bounded up and down the berms and a flock of goldfinches settled in, each perching in a cyclone fence slot in an avian pyramid.

Now the site of the half-built, bankrupt Sienna Court Condominiums in Evanston resembles a zoo exhibit with cliffs, savannahs, trickling water from sprinklers and a construction ladder turned three-story roost for its grackle, house sparrow and gull residents. Location, location.

And the human residents of the “wetland reversion,” their units spaced as far apart as streetlights and their resale dreams dashed into receivership?

They’re discovering the only thing worse than living next to a construction zone is not living next to a construction zone.

A block away, a curb-hugging, zero-lot-line eyesore called Ferris Homes has no wildlife reintroduction in progress because it has no green space. But a year after the 49-condominium unit building opened, the bank is foreclosing on 38 units because of unpaid construction loans. Correct. Only 11 units sold.

And how was your year?

This recession hasn’t just made things rough for people who sell things and people who can no longer buy them (because they also sell things to people who can no longer buy them.) It’s made things rough for the nation’s copywriters.

Once upon a time there were two can’t-fail headlines: Grand Opening and Sale.

Sure, you’d add “pre-construction” and “builder’s special” to Grand Opening when there was nothing to look at but homesites–also known as dirt–and a Realtor in a pixie haircut. Sure you’d add “model close-out,” when the sign for the Rivers at Lakewood or Timbers at Creekwood and red and blue balloons were up. But Grand Opening did the heavy lifting.

And sale? Once upon a time you could have any kind of sale–an end-of-year, end-of-the-summer, Christmas-in-July, we’ve-lost-our-lease sale (right), we’ve-lost-our-mind sale (having got it back from last year), back-to-school, Labor Day, Memorial Day and Father’s Day sale, we’ve-got-to-make-room-for-the-new-models (right) sale– as long as merch wasn’t on sale all the time.

Flash forward to Christmas 2008 when retailers decided the only way to salvage Christmas was to start discounting at Halloween and haven’t let up yet.

Now Grand Opening suggests its evil twin, Grand Closing–with real estate reporters replaced by count reporters–and Sale has devolved into the proverbial Every Day Low Prices which is to say merch is on sale all the time.

And it gets worse. Remember the dictum about good restaurants don’t advertise?

In this college town, “good restaurants” have fallen back on the campus marketing 101 tactic of wind-shielding cars. They are putting We Have Take-Out And Delivery hand-scrawled signs on cardboard in their windows vowing to bring you their white table cloth service in clamshells and paper bags to enjoy by TV light! Hey a customer is a customer.

Parents of Northwestern University undergrads may pay $36,756 a year for tuition, but that doesn’t mean Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door Spa could stay in business offering massages for $140 and facials for $180. It held its Grand Closing in 2008.

And the Evanston library has a new custodial challenge: what to do about the growing assemblage of “luggage” hidden behind chairs by the homeless while they wait for the overnight shelter to open.

Still, the hardest part for copywriters in this recession is not the death of Grand Opening and Sale as attention riveters and traffic creators.

It’s not finding value-reverent substitutes for “luxurious,” “pamper” and “indulge” or a way of saying “staycation” without making people roll their eyes and want to flash their unemployment cards.

It’s even not the 33 seconds of legal disclaimers mandated in radio ads that undo the preceding offer and make the announcer sound like Al Franken doing a gag.

It is finding a replacement for “needs.”

Because in the days when people bought lattes, Pilates classes and $35 cab rides, no one questioned “hair care needs,” “home-decoration needs,” or even “cruise ship” and “jewelry” needs. No one thought it insensitive and a little decadent.

Nor did anyone think recession would come to describe their new condo’s landscaping.

Recent recalls of pathogen tainted milk, meat, chicken and cheese make you wonder if E.coli, campylobacter, salmonella and listeria are the new four food groups.

Of course just because our food harbors harmful microbes doesn’t mean it’s not also full of antibiotics. Especially since dosing farm animals with antibiotics is why so many resistant microbes are in the food.

Seventy percent of all US antibiotics are fed to farm animals according to the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009 (PAMTA) introduced by Louise Slaughter (D-NY) this spring. Over 80 percent of pig and sheep farms and cattle feedlots put antibiotics in the feed or water to produce growth with less feed and compensate, “for crowded, unsanitary and stressful farming and transportation conditions,” says the bill.

Forty-eight percent of our national streams are tainted with antibiotics says the bill and meat and poultry bought in US grocery stores shows, “disturbingly high levels of Campylobacter and Salmonella bacteria.”

Nor are the antibiotics only in the stream.

In April the FDA wrote Nappanee, IN dairy farmer Lyle J. Borkholder that a cow he sold “for slaughter as food” had excessive sulfadimethoxine–an antibiotic which affects the thyroid–hypothalamus axis– in its liver and muscle. In May, it wrote dairy farmers Alva Carter Jr. and Allen Carter in Portales, NM that their cow, also sold as human food, had excessive flunixin in its liver and desfuroylceftiofur in its kidneys, two other antibiotics.

Both farmers were told, “you hold animals under conditions that are so inadequate that medicated animals bearing potentially harmful drug residues are likely to enter the food supply.”

Worse, veterinarians who condemn the use of gentamicin in food animals, a tenacious antibiotic that destroys kidneys and hearing in humans, revealed in a survey in the current issue of Journal of Dairy Science that they believe Ohio farmers routinely and illegally use the drug in the cows they market.

Nor is mad cow or bovine spongiform encephalopathy a distant fear after the largest meat recall in US history last year, much of it destined for school lunch programs. In its final report on Chino, CA-based Hallmark Meat Company in November, the USDA found disease-spreading tissue called Specified Risk Material (SRM) is routinely left on edible carcasses–hello–and Food Safety and Inspection Services staff believe hand sanitizers kill prions. Not even radiation, Formaldehyde or 18 minutes in an autoclave kills prions, the agent that spreads mad cow disease.

The American Medical Association, Union of Concerned Scientists, Pew Charitable Trusts, most of the antibiotic-taking public and even Chipotle Gourmet Burritos and Tacos support PAMTA. But the pharmaceutical industry, which call itself the American Meat Institute when it is selling animal drugs, does not.

Not only would the legislation ban its current gravy train of penicillins, tetracyclines, macrolides, lincosamides, streptograminds, aminoglycosides and sulfonamides–the pharmaceutical industry wants to replace human drug profits with animal now that insurers are saying YOU WANT US TO SPEND WHAT? about new blockbuster drugs.

Nor is Big Meat happy. When the FDA announced a ban of just one type of antibiotic last year–cephalosporins–shills from the egg, chicken, turkey, dairy, pork and cattle industries stormed the Hill complaining that a ban would threaten their ability to keep animals “healthy.” But what do they mean by healthy?

Veal calves described in a government slaughter manual as “unable to rise from a recumbent position and walk because they are tired or cold”? (And refused by the wife of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Sarah, this month during her G8 visit to Italy?)

Tyson chickens, 11 percent of which “die of respiratory insufficiency; their bodies not found until six weeks later–or on slaughterhouse day,” according to Yanna Smith in Namibia’s SPACE Magazine? Suffering from “chicken madness” from ammonia fumes?

Antibiotic-enabled animal “health” was manifest when officials raiding an egg farm in Turner, Maine in December–on a tip from Mercy For Animals–had to be treated by doctors for breathing distress after entering the egg barns.

Photos show dazed state workers in Hazmat suits leaving the Quality Egg of New England barns, as disoriented by the sanitation abuses as the cruelty.

Nor were they hungry for lunch.

When President Obama told gathered physicians at the American Medical Association’s annual meeting in his home town this month, “I’m not advocating caps on malpractice awards which I believe can be unfair to people who’ve been wrongfully harmed,” he was booed like Chicago Cub Milton Bradey. “Yank him,” was probably next.

Who remembered that in 1993 a similar message by his Secretary of State–another homey named Hillary–received a standing ovation? (Though the long knives did come out later.)

Of course you can’t blame the 236,000 member AMA for wanting to conduct medicine instead of defensive tests to ward off lawsuits that sit on medicine. Hello?

Less forgivable are the “issues” the AMA pursues like cruise ship hygiene and physician penmanship even as two Iraq wars and one Afghanistan war have raged.

Can we expect resolutions like “AMA Decries Use of Plastic Spatulas,” or “Doctors Worried About Increase in Planetary Tilt,” asked Mark DePaolis, MD in the Star Tribune in 1994.

It’s not that the AMA doesn’t know the issues. It has taken up elder abuse, bullying, corporeal punishment in schools, alcohol abuse, highway safety, binge drinking, medical marijuana, cosmetic sun tanning, medical waste, livestock antibiotics, organ donation, terminal care, physician assisted suicide, women, gay and patient rights, AIDS ethics and patient privacy in the past.

In the 1990’s it confronted Big Tobacco–and embarrassment over its own tobacco stock holdings–with a high profile, physician-led “Dump the Hump,” Walk a Mile Against Joe Camel parade in Chicago’s Loop.

Nor has the AMA shrunk from addressing the “intentional violence” of boxing, violent movies and video games, “private ownership of rapid fire assault rifles” and physician involvement in executions–though a resolution against the death penalty itself was defeated in 2000. (It “wasn’t the AMA’s business,” said Colorado AMA delegate Steven Thorson, MD.)

It’s just that some issues are more equal than others.

So even though AMA delegates passed a resolution against direct to consumer (DTC) drug advertising in 1991– the “ads mislead the public and add to the cost of medication,” it stated–and even though it reaffirmed the stance in 2001–it’s like a competition “to see who can sell more of antihistamines or nasal sprays,” said New Jersey AMA delegate Angelo Agro, MD–the AMA reversed itself in 2005 and decided the notorious, ask-your-doctor ads were a First Amendment issue.

And speaking of the First Amendment, the AMA’s controversial and semi-hidden practice of selling its physicians’ personal prescribing information to marketers was also called “free speech” in recent court rulings in Maine and New Hampshire.

For more than 50 years, the AMA has profited by selling physicians’ personal data “to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, medical colleges and universities, medical equipment and supply companies, and other institutions interested in supplying goods and services to physicians and group practices,” it admits on its website. “AMA’s Database Licensees are specialized in direct mail, telemarketing, sales call reporting, and other database marketing services,” it says.

Physicians are free to opt out of the $50 million a year scheme, censured at the AMA’s 2007 annual meeting by Lydia Vaias, MD of the National Physicians Alliance and John Santa, MD of the Prescription Project, a group against such access–if they know about it.

But 40 percent of physicians surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2007 didn’t–and 74 percent disapproved.

No, the AMA’s “issues agenda” is as plain as the drug ads which adorned its website as recently as 2007.

Why, for example, does it resolve this year to go after hormone selling “for-profit Web sites, anti-aging clinics and compounding pharmacies,” when it has given hormone giant Wyeth who’s hoaxed women into cancer causing hormone therapy for four decades a pass?

Why resolve this year there is “no need” for more research into a vaccine/autism connection and support “universal vaccination” while pledging to explore non-vaccine links further? Maybe green beans?

Why ignore the taxpayer funded warehousing of so many of the nation’s children, poor and elderly on “atypical antipyschotics” even as over 20 states sue?

And why ignore the epidemic of veteran suicides and suicides on asthma, seizure, pain and anti-smoking medications approved as “safe”?

Why ignore “checkbook science” in a year in which two leading researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, two at Emory University and one at the University of Minnesota are exposed for pay-for-play drug schemes that promote unsafe drugs?

Maybe it’s someone else who should get booed.

After two days of hearings, the FDA Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee voted to recommend approval of AstraZeneca’s Seroquel (quetiapine) for the acute treatment of schizophrenia in adolescents 13-17, acute treatment of bipolar mania in children 10-12 and adolescents 13-17; Pfizer’s Geodon (ziprasidone) for the acute treatment of manic or mixed episodes associated with bipolar disorder, with or without psychotic features in children and adolescents ages 10-17; and Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa (olanzapine) for the acute treatment of manic or mixed episodes associated with bipolar I disorder and acute treatment of schizophrenia in adolescents.

Most people know pharma’s blockbuster atypical antipsychotics Seroquel, Zyprexa and Geodon, off label marketed to kids, the elderly, the uncategorizable and the suggestible –are you sure you don’t have racing thoughts ask ads?–correlate with weight gain, diabetes and metabolic derangement.

But who knew until the hearings that Seroquel also causes an extra seven or eight heart beats a minute in children? Possibly for as long as they take it? With no studies to show the long term effect? Or the safety of drugs to treat the effect? And no theory as to why?

Who knew Seroquel could cause cataracts?

Who knew Geodon could cause a prolonged QT interval also known as “sudden death.”

Who knew the atypicals, along with tremor and muscle rigidity, could cause the permanent and stigmatizing tardive dyskinesia they were developed to prevent? Hello?

Of course AstraZeneca doctor Liza O’Dowd did her best during her presentation to sail through the negatives–assuring the panel that Seroquel’s blood pressure, weight, glucose and prolactin issues could be “controlled and monitored” and that they “didn’t lead to discontinuation of the study” (let’s hope not when the trial was three weeks.)

But she was less forthcoming when discussing the five child suicides seen during trials, a slide she only produced in response to panel questions.

AstraZeneca’s Ihor Rak, MD did his best to dismiss cataract problems as “poor hygiene, nutrition and accidents” seen with schizophrenics but had no ready answer when panelist member Benedetto Vitiello, MD asked why not, then, remove instructions to examine patient lenses from the prescribing information.

AstraZeneca presenter Lili Kopala, MD was certain the study suicides stemmed from patients who were “still on the recovery curve,” but when panelist Christopher Granger, MD challenged her, she changed her mind and said, “they may be random.”

And panelists had other questions.

Not being trained psychiatrists, how did you make the differential diagnosis of bipolar for your studies asked panelist Kenneth Towbin, MD? How do you know irritability, anxiety or aggression don’t denote other disorders? How could a Seroquel study in which children with mania are kept on stimulants be scientifically valid–or ethical?

Children are often on “cocktails of seven or eight medications,” agreed Rochelle Caplan, MD, and “once we get them off,” they might just have a learning disability.

Worse than problems diagnosing pediatric bipolar or schizophrenia–3,000 suspected childhood schizophrenia cases yielded only 110 actual cases in one study said panelist Nitin Gogtay, MD–and worse than the lack of “real world” and mixed medicine “cocktail” studies was the brevity of the studies themselves said panelists.

How can three and six week studies suggest safety for maintenance treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders which lasts decades? “We know they won’t stop [using the medications] at the acute phase,” said Towbin.

Panelist Granger confessed to “real discomfort” approving drugs which “generat[e] metabolic syndrome in adolescents in a very short period of time” for “indefinite use” on the basis of three or six week trials. “Hopefully we’re not exposing someone for decades,” agreed fellow cardiologist Edward Pritchett, MD.

But Thomas Laughren, MD, FDA’s director of psychiatric drugs was more upbeat. Not only was he sure pediatric safety could be extrapolated from adult studies–promising to include the clinical leap on labels–he didn’t want to be derailed over the two children who perversely died from stroke and cardiopulmonary failure in Geodon studies either.

There’s “hazard in drawing too much from subsetting the data,” said Laughren. Phillip Chappell, MD of Pfizer thanked him.

Frank Greenway, MD, an endocrine specialist on the panel, was also upbeat, observing prolactin elevation from the atypicals was less than a “prolactin secreting tumor.” Whew.

Still the elephant in the room at the proceedings was why drugs that are already available off-label need FDA approval at all–and why it’s urgent that kids showing symptoms be Treated Now.

(One pharma doctor claimed gray matter shrinks ever time someone is “psychotic” but others admitted early treatment has no effect on the course of the diseases.)

The answer of course was in the other elephant in the room–the wall of 40 pharma funded doctors sitting at attention, outnumbering FDA representatives two to one and unabashed referred as “sponsors.” (Though their Medicaid streams imply that’s backwards.)

It’s the sponsors who exhort doctors–and parents–to subject kids to increased heart beat, sudden death, metabolic syndrome, tardive dyskinesia, cataracts, stroke and suicidal side effects for diseases they may not even have.

Certainly that’s how two mothers who testified during the open public hearings felt.

Liza Ortiz of Austin, TX lost her 13-year-old son to Seroquel toxicity earlier this year. “His hands twisted in ways I never thought possible in the I.C.U., ” she said.

Mary Kitchens of Bandera, TX said her son suffers from crossed eyes, nightmares, trembling, neutropenia, hypothyroidism, tachycardia, dyskinesia and cogwheeling since Seroquel treatment.

“AstraZeneca marketed this to my child in 2003,” she said holding the original Seroquel package for the panel to see. “And now they want your seal of approval.”

But the good news according to hormone maker Wyeth’s Joseph Camardo, MD is that younger women, aged 51 to 54, are starting to use HRT rather than women older than 63 and “the same risks may not apply with the new patterns of use!”

The “timing” theory–that discredited hormone therapy still has benefits for younger women–is gaining traction in articles and marketing materials thanks to industry sponsored studies showing “new” cognitive, heart and metabolic benefits. In fact in May the Washington Post reprinted such HRT revisionism from the “news source” of the Massachusetts General Hospital website where it was flanked by an article about HRT’s heart benefits–written by a Wyeth paid doctor–and an exploration of HRT’s “cancer question.” Five thousand women with Prempro and Premarin injury suits wouldn’t call it a question.

Doctors at a Philippine Society of Climacteric Medicine convention this month in San Juan City are similarly re-enamored with HRT according to the Philippine news site tribuneonline, claiming it shields women from cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, cognitive disorders, dementia, skin atrophy, atherosclerosis and even urge-stress incontinence–abjuring the science.

“The beneficial effects of HRT in younger postmenopausal women appear to be due to HRT’s ability to increase high-density lipoproteins (”good” fats) and reduce low-density lipoproteins (”bad” fats), glucose, weight, insulin levels, the incidence of new onset diabetes and a handful of other risk factors for heart diseases,” says Shelley R. Salpeter, MD, clinical professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and a Wyeth paid consultant according to the American Journal of Medicine.

Last summer the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth also took a second look at HRT with a continuing medical education course titled a “A Fresh Look at Hormone Therapy,” chaired by James A. Simon, MD a consultant and paid speaker for Wyeth according to course materials.

“Estrogen deficiency, the hallmark of menopause, can diminish a woman’s quality of life,” begins the course’s audacious “monograph” as it it were still 1966 and Feminine Forever, were a bestseller–whereupon it also segues into HRT’s “cardioprotective” properties, a decades long marketing claim never approved by the FDA and therefore illegal.

Of course, most people realize that HRT causes most of the conditions it was supposed to prevent–the H stands for hoax–and was hardly the fountain of youth it was marketed as for 40 years. In fact HRT is so dangerous, WHI was stopped so no more women would sustain its adverse side effects.

Instead of preventing heart disease, it increases risk by 26 percent.

Instead of preventing stroke, it increases the risk by 41 percent.

Instead of preventing breast cancer, it increases the risk by 29 percent.

Instead of preventing blood clots, it doubles the risk.

And there’s more. Hormone therapy also increases the risk of ovarian cancer, dementia, asthma, malignant melanoma, urinary incontinence, gout, the need for joint replacement, gallbladder disease, dying of lung cancer, a shrinking brain and complicates diabetes according to other studies.

Nor do the adverse effects happen slowly. Findings from last year’s San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium show HRT doubles the risk for breast cancer in just five years and increases the risk in just two years.

HRT is such a preventable cause of disease among women, US breast-cancer cases fell 7 percent and estrogen-positive cases 15 percent as soon as women turned their backs on HRT–sparing 14,000 women the first year. Cases of US women having heart attacks fell too according to the journal Medical Care and CNN. Such much for cardioprotective.

Now that HRT is recommended for the briefest possible use (if at all), hormone makers aren’t proclaiming women should be on it from “menopause to death,” like Wyeth’s former CEO Robert Essner rhapsodized during HRT’s golden age when Wyeth pocketed a cool $3 billion a year “replacing” women’s hormones.

They now use the term “menopause transition” hoping the transition will last five years.

But whether women are prescribed HRT, seizure medications, antidepressants or the electroconvulsive therapy which was also once popular for menopause, the take home message is aging is a disease in women and they need medication.

And the “timing” theory is all about the timing of revenue.

Trials of Singular, Serevent, Foradil, Flovent, Xolair, Accolate and Xopenex conducted at the Tucson, AZ facility of Vivra Asthma & Allergy were corrupted by protocol violations and outright falsifications says Robert Davidson, MD, a former clinical research subinvestigator at the facility.

San Mateo, CA-based Vivra Asthma & Allergy was the nation’s largest respiratory disease physician practice until a merger with Lakewood, CO-based Gambro in 1997 and with El Segundo, CA-based DaVita in 2005.

In aggressive study subject recruitment schemes in the late 1990’s, patients with abnormal EKGs, multiple risk factors for coronary artery disease, arrhythmia, pulmonary embolism and rheumatic fever histories, acute illnesses and even pituitary tumors were enrolled with impunity in trials that earned investigators as much as $10,000 per patient charges Davidson. Patients were “prescreened” for asthma drug trials with medically unnecessary pulmonary function tests (PFTs) without their knowledge or consent and had medication dosages reduced in apparent efforts to qualify them for the lucrative trials.

Staff could be seen to enter rooms where placebo and real drugs were mixed, unblinding and invalidating entire studies sent to the FDA as data for new drug applications.

The brazen “study buddy” and “cross over” arrangements, as staff referred to them, included churning or serial enrolling of patients into clinical trials despite risks to their health and early terminations, coercing unwilling patients to participate and direct falsification of patient study diaries say documents filed by Davidson in a federal complaint.

In 2006, the FDA mandated black box warnings on Serevent and Foradil, tested at Vivra and elsewhere, for increasing the risk of asthma-related death after adverse outcomes forced the early termination of a large clinical trial. Warning labels for Singulair, also tested at Vivra and under FDA investigation for suicidal side effects, were strengthened four times in 2007 and an antibiotic tested at Vivra, Raxar, was withdrawn altogether in 1999 after links to 13 deaths.

FDA inspections of the Vivra Tucson facility where Jay Grossman, MD served as principal investigator (P.I.) from 1993-2000 confirm the clinical subterfuge.

“Three study coordinators stated that they saw diary card blank prior to subject entering exam room with P.I. for visit 2,” reads a report from a May 5 though June 28, 1999 inspection obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. “Five to ten minutes after, the diary had approximately two weeks of diary symptoms and peak flow entered.”

“On multiple occasions over the last 8 months the P.I. strongly counseled the S.I. [subinvestigator] to NOT mention potential risks of study participation to potential study subjects, (such as arrhythmia, drug-drug interaction, etc.) so as to not ’scare them away’,” the FDA report reads elsewhere.

“Coordinator stated that subject called to say she could not participate in a 12-hour a day study due to her schedule. P.I. called the subjects [sic] estranged husband to say that they had to get the disease under control.”

Nor was patient safety apparently protected.

“P.I. enrolled subject into study despite subject having a clear study exclusion (maintenance inhaled corticosteroid therapy),” an FDA report states elsewhere. “Subject subsequently experienced a SAE [severe adverse event] (hospitalized) while in the study. Moreover, this subject had recently participated in a prior study which she required multiple prednisone bursts and multiple courses of antibiotic therapy for several bouts of acute sinusitis with asthma exacerbation.”

FDA reports from a 1999 inspection at the Tucson Vivra facility also document missing informed consent forms, clinical records changed to minimize alcohol and cigarette consumption, and records rewritten and ripped up by Dr. Grossman according to witnesses.

Reached by telephone, communications officials at Gambro and DaVita were unable to discuss the trials. Dr. Grossman did not respond to faxed and email messages.

Questions have also been raised about the billing procedures of Vivra, which was acquired by Gambro in 1997. Pulmonary function tests were performed on all patients regardless of medical necessity states former Vivra Tucson nurse Joanne Wray in court documents–amounting to a time and money saving gratuity for drug companies, shouldered by insurers, to prevent costly “screening failures” when studies began.

In 2000, Gambro agreed to a $40 million settlement for submitting false claims to Medicare, Medicaid and TRICARE and entered into a Corporate Integrity Agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services only to have to agree to another settlement for $350 million in 2004.

Yet despite the irregularities and red flags, clinical trials at the Vivra Tucson facility which still appear in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Annals of Internal Medicine, were not stopped by the FDA, institutional review boards, trial sponsors, contract research organizations or the Justice Department. Nor was the facility’s clearance to conduct trials revoked.

In fact, FDA inspections were actually delayed to facilitate the new drug applications the studies were for–like clearing a plane with mechanical problems for takeoff to not hold up travelers. This “safety last” policy is a expected outgrowth of the 1992 Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) that allows drug companies to pay the FDA to accelerate approvals, says Davidson.

“It takes time to obtain a properly administered, formal informed consent with full disclosure of risks and benefits and that slows study-subject recruitment and ultimately, delays the time to obtain market approval from FDA,” says Davidson. “It is virtually certain that there have been deaths of US citizens because of the fraudulent or seriously-flawed clinical research PDUFA encourages. Nor is FDA likely to revoke expedited market approvals because that would be tantamount to admitting that they ‘goofed.’”

When presented with 51 allegations of Vivra’s medical wrongdoing in 2000, the Arizona Board of Medical Examiners also did not act, calling the evidence “insufficient to support a violation” of Arizona Revised Statutes.

This is not the first time bogus, pay-to-play research which risks study subjects and the public’s health has surfaced. Recently Alabama physician Anne Kirkman Campbell began serving a sentence in a federal prison in Lexington, KY for clinical trials she conducted of the controversial, antibiotic Ketek, linked to liver failures and deaths.

Campbell “got greedy” and enrolled her own family, staff and more than one percent of the adult population of the town of Gadsden, AL in clinical trials wrote the St. Petersburg Times in 2007.

Despite revelations of Campbell’s fraud and problems found at other study sites by regulators while the drug was being tested, Ketek sailed through the FDA and was approved on April 1, 2004.

Ketek was also tested at the Tucson Vivra facility.

While it cites patent expirations of blockbusters like Lipitor, Effexor and Plavix for falling earnings — “patient” expirations from Vioxx, Bextra, Premarin/Prempro, Vytorin, Avandia, Chantix, Ketek, Baycol and fen phen have helped.

Forty years of marketing the “diseases” of menopause and aging — Over 35? You Might Be At Risk for Menopause! — ended when hormone replacement therapy was found to cause not prevent the symptoms women feared.

A decade and a half of osteoporosis profits collapsed when bone drugs Fosamax, Boniva and Actonel were found to cause not prevent fractures and jaw bone death in some cases. Nor did it help that Boniva czar Sally Field allegedly broke a bone. Oops.

And speaking of causing not preventing, SSRI/SSNI antidepressants are linked to so many suicides — 660 in newspaper reports alone — the pharma founded and operated American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) is staging massive anti-suicide walks in June against an epidemic it largely created.

Even asthma inhalers are causing deaths they were supposed to prevent — nor are people rushing to inoculate their 11-year-old daughters with Gardisil. And let’s face it: the depression-with-pain and pain-with-depression fibromyaglia financial eddy can only last so long.

What’s a pharmaceutical industry in the middle of a recession with nothing in the pipeline but me-too drugs to do?

Say hello to monotherapy and treatment resistant conditions!

Expensive and dangerous drugs that don’t work are now said to not work as monotherapy. You need to add a second or third drug. Conditions that don’t respond to expensive and dangerous drugs (that don’t work) are now said to be treatment resistant — not conditions treated with the wrong drugs or assigned the wrong diagnoses.

“Monotherapy” and “treatment resistance” keep patients on their meds — including ones that fail as “monotherapy”–and insurers paying for them in the absence of any evidence they are working! (see: little light going out in the refrigerator.) They upsell patients who were on one med into increasingly common and perverse drug cocktails with several meds that require more drugs to treat the side effects. Best of all, they shift the emphasis from pharma’s failures to a patient’s “failures”: It’s not our drug that’s not working, it’s your treatment resistant condition! In other words, they’re a stimulus plan.

Of course even before the recession, pharma’s favorite payup was pediatric conditions covered by state disability tax dollars — also known as Claim Approved. No wonder pharma’s got new drug applications before the FDA for pediatric use of antipsychotics Seroquel, Geodon and Zyprexa this June. (Though judging from childhood diabetes cases in the US, the drugs are already in wide, off label use.)

But thanks to the recession, the pediatric diseases that surfaced when pharma debuted pills for them like social anxiety, passive-aggressive, oppositional-defiance and personality disorders now have “treatment resistant” varieties. Think children can’t have “treatment resistant” depression, ADHD, aggression, mania, anxiety and bipolar, obsessive compulsive and mood disorders because they’re too young? You haven’t been to clinicaltrials.gov lately.

And speaking of clinical trials, drugs are also being tested on children with schizophrenia — a condition that was rare in childhood until recently and the recession.

“Awareness of childhood-onset schizophrenia is rapidly increasing, with a more precise definition now available of the clinical picture and early signs, the outcome and the treatment strategies,” writes Gabriele Masi, MD, a Lilly funded doctor, in the journal CNS Drugs, lamenting the “hesitancy on the part of clinicians to make a diagnosis,” of schizophrenia.

Symptoms of childhood schizophrenia — “social deficits” and “delusions . . . related to childhood themes” — might look like symptoms of childhood itself (hello) but Zyprexa in conjunction with “social, scholastic, and familial interventions,” writes Masi — once called “bringing a kid up” — can turn the child around.

Of course Zyprexa has had a checkered past–at least as “monotherapy” — with manufacturer Lilly agreeing in April to pay the state of Georgia $6 million for hiding its diabetes, high blood sugar and excessive weight gain side effects in the latest in a string of damaging settlements. But in March it was granted a new lease on life when the FDA approved it in Lilly’s Zyprexa/Prozac combination drug, Symbyax, as the first treatment for adults with treatment resistant depression.

The April suicide of 7-year-old Gabriel Myers of Margate, FL who the Florida Department of Children & Families says was also prescribed Symbyax drew less attention.

So bad that when Maine Department of Agriculture officials raided the factory farm on April 1, four Department workers themselves succumbed to the ammonia filled barns and had to be treated by doctors for burned lungs, missing work.

(No wonder Quality says its barns have “automatic feed and water systems” and “eggs are never touched by human hands.”)

So bad that OSHA is now investigating. (Where were they before?)

So bad that Philadelphia, PA-based Eggland’s Best dropped the farm’s largest franchisee Watertown, ME-based egg giant Radlo Foods which in turn dropped Quality Egg as of May 15 and pledged to go cage free.

Quality Egg, the former DeCoster Egg Farm, though the DeCoster family is still actively involved, has a thirty year history of animal, worker and environmental abuses.

In 1977 farm neighbors filed a $5 million lawsuit because their homes were infested with manure propagating insects.

In 1980, the Labor department charged the farm with employing five 11-year-olds and a 9-year-old.

In 1988 it let 100,000 chickens burn to death in a fire.

In 1996 it was presented with a fine for $3.6 million by the federal government for worker abuses. (Legal assistance lawyer Cesar Britos was overcome by barn ammonia too.)

And in 2001 a cruelty complaint was filed about dead hens intermingled with live ones during transport which the Department of Agriculture has not made public because it needs to be “reviewed and redacted.” (hello?)

But thanks to video from an undercover investigator for Mercy For Animals (MFA), agriculture and law enforcement officials raided Quality Egg for eight hours on April 1–with a search warrant and in the company of State Police troopers.

Like all battery cage operations, the 1,700-acre Quality Egg facility confines millions of hens in tiny cages in which they can’t walk, fully spread their wings or engage in other basic biological behaviors for over a year until they are rewarded with slaughter.

Quality’s seven 700-foot long barns with caged hens stacked on top of each other over manure pits produce 21 million eggs for such household names as Wal-Mart and grocery stores Stop & Shop, Shaw’s and Hannaford’s.

Video from the MFA investigator shows live hens left to hang by their feet over conveyer belts, left to suffocate in garbage cans and left to drown in manure pits which employees kicked them into.

Hens “lucky” enough to remain in their cages hover between life and death, their lungs infected and eyes plastered shut with keratoconjunctivitis lesions from living their whole lives in the ammonia fumes that sickened investigators in a few minutes.

“A hen’s head and wing were trapped under the cage’s front wall. One of her legs was stretched out and would not move or bend. She had a gash on her right side, leaving the skin split open and mostly yellow inside. A gash on her left side was red from fresh blood with a layer of dust partially covering the wound,” writes the investigator in his diary.

“Another live hen, also trapped under her cage’s front wall, had the side of her face on a moving egg belt. I saw that the side of her face, including her eye, was encrusted in what appeared to be egg yolk and dust.”

After the raid which was covered by the Associated Press, state and local officials, Quality’s customer/distributors and the grocery stores involved all professed ignorance of the conditions. Right.

Quality Egg Compliance Manager Bob Leclerc noted that Quality adheres to United Egg Producer guidelines — which permit battery cages — and said that none of the incidents were brought to “the attention of management before.”

Maybe he hadn’t yet watched the Mercy For Animals video which shows the investigator pointing out abuse — repeatedly — to other workers and supervisors including to Jay DeCoster, the son of Jack DeCoster. (An employee who was told there were live hens in trash cans he was emptying says, “It don’t matter.”)

A week after the raid — and before expected animal cruelty charges — Leclerc cleaned up the six feet deep manure piles and dying hens at Quality Egg and let the press in.

But it was a little late says Mercy For Animals executive director Nathan Runkle.

The egg industry tries to pretend it’s a few “bad employees” when it’s exposed says Runkle. But in reality the abuse videotaped depicts “standard handling and killing practices used on egg farms across the country. It is systemic, widespread and endemic to caged egg operations.”

In March the Justice Department charged AstraZeneca with knowing and hiding the diabetes side effects of Seroquel. But this month the FDA considers expanding the anti-psychotic’s approvals to depression and anxiety.

And in January, Eli Lilly pled guilty to promoting its antipsychotic Zyprexa for unapproved and dangerous uses in a $1.4 billion settlement. But in March the FDA approved Lilly’s Zyprexa/Prozac combo, Symbyax for treatment resistant depression (TRD). What do you get when you cross Zyprexa with Prozac? Someone who gains 100 pounds and feels great about it!

“TRD” is such a new pharma invention it googles as Toyota Racing Development and Teacher Recruitment Days. But it will soon move ’script like GAD (general anxiety disorder), MDD (major depressive disorder) ADD (attention deficit disorder) RLS (restless legs syndrome) GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) and PMDD (Premenstrual dysphoric disorder)–and for the same reasons.

Of course FDA drug approvals are only as good as the studies. Which is the problem.

Forest paid Massachusetts General Hospital’s Jeffrey Bostic, MD $750,000 to chat up Celexa and Lexapro according to US District Court in Boston filings. AstraZeneca paid University of Minnesota Charles Schulz, MD $112,000 to push Seroquel according to US District Court in Orlando filings. And a decade of pain “studies” conducted by Baystate Medical Center’s Scott S. Reuben, MD on Vioxx, Lyrica, Celebrex and Effexor were completely fabricated–including the patients say published reports.

And speaking of “made up, Coast IRB, an institutional review board which oversees some 300 clinical trials and 3,000 researchers agreed last year to approve a human trial for “Adhesiabloc,” a surgical gel which Congress and the Government Accountability Office completely made up in a sting operation. Oops.

And let’s not forget Joseph your-child-is-bipolar Biederman, MD at Harvard who assured benefactor Johnson & Johnson his studies would have pro Risperdal results according to the New York Times–in advance of doing them. (Why leave things up to science?)

And Charles “Paxil” Nemeroff, MD who was forced to step down in December as psychiatry chairman at Emory University thanks to unreported GlaxoSmithKline income of up to $800,000.

And the pharma funded studies continue!

Last May a pro Lexapro article, “Escitalopram and Problem-Solving Therapy for Prevention of Poststroke Depression,” ran in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, with no mention of financial ties author Robert G. Robinson, MD has to Forest.

Why was, “a researcher with a history of being funded by SSRI makers…given a forum in the national media to tell the general public that anyone who has had a stroke, whether or not they have been diagnosed with depression, should start a prophylactic regimen of Lexapro…even though non-medical approaches perform just as well,” wrote Jonathan Leo, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroanatomy at Lincoln Memorial University in the British Medical Journal in March.

And then there’s AstraZeneca’s “studies.”

Seroquel is linked to high blood sugar, weight gain, diabetes, cholesterol and triglycerides abnormalities, sudden cardiac death, suicide, Iraq war veteran deaths and the tardive dyskinesia it is supposed to prevent.

But its “safety” was established by a different kind of chemistry.

Research director for Seroquel, Wayne MacFadden, was having affairs with two women responsible for Seroquel studies say court documents: a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and a ghostwriter at Waltham, MA-based medical communications firm Parexel.

The studies upon which the FDA approved Seroquel for bipolar disorder–called “Bolder” I and II–were written by a ghostwriter, possibly accelerated by a motel room. And seated on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee at the time was Jorge Armenteros, MD, who has been a paid AstraZeneca speaker for five years according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He now heads the committee as the FDA considers expanding Seroquel approvals to include depression and anxiety this month–and to children in June.

Hopefully FDA will keep some Seroquel for itself.

For excruciating minutes the sow, hanging by a logging chain from a front loader, suffocates and convulses while authority figures look on. Photos even show a farmhand hugging the animal while she dies to mock an upset employee.

And when the perpetrators are brought to court and the video introduced as evidence? Not guilty! (See: Rodney King; Simi Valley trial.)

Even though the HBO documentary that grew out of the 2006 incidents, Death on a Factory Farm broadcast in March, feels like a victory — it documents the agony of pigs on Ken Wiles’ 6,000 sow farrowing operation and the trial that found him not guilty of cruelty — nothing viewers see is illegal or considered cruel.

Worse, Wiles, and his son Joe, still have their jobs, their pigs and their macabre way of putting pork on America’s dinner table.

Ken Wiles was a stickler for manure management says “Pete,” the Humane Farming Association (HFA) investigator/employee who shot the HBO video. Farm hands had to pressure wash every inch of manure from farrowing crates — sometimes using knives — while Wiles watched and corrected them.

He just wasn’t a stickler about animal care.

“There were two different ‘vaccines’ with different names and different colored labels we were supposed to give the pigs to prevent diseases,” says Pete in an exclusive interview. “I asked when we should be giving one versus the other and Wiles said it didn’t matter as long as the animals got one.”

Unfortunately “one” was nothing but sterile diluent.

Call it “triage” on an unmanageable 6,000-sow farm or the banality of factory farming says Pete but amid the rows of breeding sows — who bit and resisted their piglets removal — were pigs Wiles let starve to death.

“I’d watch them get thinner every day until they died,” says Pete noting that Wayne County Municipal Judge Stuart Miller threw out the starvation charges in the original indictment and refused to allow most of the video into evidence because “he didn’t want to watch it.”

Vaginal prolapses as big as two feet, encouraged by slippery floors and confinement crates say veterinarians, were ignored — as were ubiquitous bleeding and infected vulvas.

Hanging was considered cheaper than lethal injection and safer than shooting an animal especially since some farm hands were “convicted felons forbidden to use firearms,” said Ken Wiles in court. Yet Pete also witnessed Joe Wiles take a gun out of a pail and shoot a pig three times while never taking a break from his cell phone conversation or even taking aim. The wounded animal was still breathing minutes later.

Nor did “handling” make any sense.

“Shock poles were used on pigs even when there was nowhere for them to go or when they were so piled together they couldn’t stand up anyway,” says Pete. “They were even used when they would cause the animal to charge you. It made no sense at all.”

Of course, the court testimony from Iowa veterinarian Paul Armbrecht that acquitted Wiles — that hanging was an acceptable method of euthanasia — also made no sense. Aren’t veterinarians sworn to alleviate animal suffering?

Nor did the $10,000 the Ohio Pork Producers Council donated to the Wiles’ legal defense make sense in light of the National Pork Producers Council statement that the HBO’s documentary “shows practices at a hog farm that are not condoned and, in fact, are abhorred by responsible pork producers.” Make up your mind folks.

But most confusing is why agribusiness, the press and the eating public continue to view factory farm animal abuse as isolated instead of endemic and definitional.

And how the latter day “hanging judge” could view a sow suspended from a front loader and not see cruelty.

Say that! On a month that began with the Alabama, Illinois church and Germany shootings and ended with the Oakland police killings — a Miami mass killing, a Turlock, CA church shooting and the Mexico shootings not even making the public’s radar — law makers are not thinking of gun owners as an oppressed minority.

In fact when police are killed with assault weapons it takes the wind out of the gun lobby’s Good-Guys-Need-To-Be-Armed-Against-Bad-Guys argument not to mention its AK-47s-Should-Be-Street-Legal-Because-We-Need-To Defend-Ourselves-and-Our-Families argument and its Enforce-Existing-Laws (Loopholes Though They Might Have) argument.

But even before the March Alabama, Illinois, Miami, Oakland and Turlock shootings Wayne LaPierre, National Rifle Association (NRA) executive vice president was on the defensive at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington D.C. in February.

Mad at the Obama administration, the press, the United Nations and a complacent public, LaPierre couldn’t decide whether Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was friend or foe — first quoting her to prove President Obama is a gun grabber, then showing clips in which she was the gun grabber recommending trigger locks and licenses.

Ordaining that Mexico needs more guns not less and that lawmakers shouldn’t legislate “on the fresh graves of tragedy,” you’d never know the NRA realized its wet dream last year when the Supreme Court affirmed the Second Amendment in District of Columbia vs. Heller.

Of course, for years the NRA’s Just Folks position against effete elites has conflicted with its actual deep-pocketed influence peddling with political campaigns and causes and turned off followers.

For years its hunter/rancher and rural constituents have recoiled at its paranoid secessionist/military weapon wing that drives so much NRA policy. In fact Alabama’s Michael McLendon — who killed his mother, grandmother, uncle, two cousins and the wife and toddler daughter of a sheriff’s deputy in March — and Terry Sedlacek — who shot and killed a pastor through the Bible he held at an Illinois church service — were poster boys for the right to own an arsenal.

What is changing is that gun lobby laws that used to be slam dunks — right to carry a concealed weapon in churches, on campuses and in state parks–are no longer sailing through legislatures. Nor is the D.C. Voting Rights Act that would legalize assault weapons, eliminate the city’s firearms registration system and ban all future gun restrictions airborne.

What is also different is newspapers like the Memphis Commercial Appeal are publishing searchable bases of state permit holders so people can see if their daycare worker or dentist is armed.

And even though concealed carry permits are “Good Guy Cards” that tell law enforcement they’ll have no trouble with you says Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Bryan Hendricks and even though the worst thing that can happen to you in life is that people find out you or your house is unarmed, the NRA is, well, scared.

Someone may break into your home and not hurt you or your family — that’s why you’re armed after all — but steal your firearms! In fact you better get more weapons to defend your weapons.

Even while the Arkansas state legislature is considering a bill to block similar release of permit holder public records, the Commercial Appeal found 70 of 154 permit holders it checked had criminal records including Bernard Avery — arrested 25 times with a murder charge dismissed on mental competency — and Reginald Miller — a felon with 11 arrests. Oops.

Still, worse for the gun lobby than the PR problem of helping to arm felons through the lax gun laws it pushes, is the image of it being afraid of you and I.

Or as Chris W. Cox, NRA-ILA executive director wrote to the Commercial Appeal “Your decision to publicize the personal information of Right-to-Carry permit holders in Tennessee is unjustifiable, disgraceful, and dangerous.”

And worse than that is the image of the gun lobby asking the government to protect it from you and me. Whatever happened to the tough guys who don’t need no %$#$% government interference?

And why are they so scared, anyway? Isn’t that backwards? They’re the ones carrying lethal weapons!

Why is it that people all across America get to work without the help of a gun — taking trains, working night shifts — but gun extremists are afraid to be in church, on college campuses and on state parks without being armed?

It makes you think of Larry Singleton who attacked and mutilated 15-year-old hitchhiker Mary Vincent near Sacramento in 1978 because he was “afraid of her.”

It was not a good week to work for the right to buy more than one firearm a month.

After previous mass shootings — the Wisconsin church killings of 7 in 2005, the Salt Lake City and Omaha mall killings of 13 in 2007, Virginia Tech in 2007 and Northern Illinois University killings of 5 last year — the public would listen to the gun lobby dogma that we need more guns not less and teachers, church goers and shoppers should be armed.

Not this time.

After a week of mass gunmen and massacres, no one wants to hear the gun lobby’s OK Corralspeak in which we good guys have to arm against the bad guys — at least until the 50 plus funerals are over.

The problem is that gun “enthusiasts” like Michael McLendon and Bruce Jeffrey “Santa Claus” Pardo are increasingly becoming the gun lobby’s poster boys.

McLendon killed his mother, grandmother, uncle, two cousins and the wife and toddler daughter of a sheriff’s deputy in Samson, Alabama, setting fire to his mother’s home and killing her dogs in last week.

Pardo killed his e-wife and her family and burned their house down in Covina, California on Christmas Eve, dressed in a jolly red suit, last year.

Both were exemplars of the right to buy more than one weapon a month which the gun lobby strongly defends.

McLendon had a cache of an M-16, an AK-47, a shotgun, two pistols and a “great amount of ammunition.” Pardo had five semi-automatic handguns and two shotguns.

Even Terry Sedlacek who shot and killed a pastor through the Bible he held at a church service in Maryville, Illinois last week and is being held at an Edwardsville jail was in the gray area — being an “avid hunter” but having no state firearms-owner identification, say news reports.

And recently another image problem is plaguing the gun lobby besides gun-collecting, family-killing arsonists. Child killers with “skills” mentored through youth hunter programs!

While the first reports of 11-year-old Jordan Brown of Wampum, Pennsylvania who shot and killed his father’s pregnant fiancée Benzie Houk in February said the child was jealous over the new sibling that was coming, later reports revealed that Dad himself had given the boy the 20-gauge shotgun and taught him to kill living things. Oops.

Even Houk had encouraged bloodsports for the 11-year-old said press reports — the same age Alabama killer Michael McLendon started hunting — which called the family “hunting enthusiasts.”

Like many states, Pennsylvania has NRA backed “mentored youth hunting programs” encouraging children under 12 to hunt with adults so hunting — and the revenue it brings to the state in licenses — doesn’t die out. In some states children as young as eight are encouraged to shoot tame pheasants the state has hatched and grown at taxpayer expense. Hey, it’s not violent video games.

Remember the eight-year-old St. Johns, Arizona boy, now nine, who shot and killed his father, Vincent Romero, and Timothy Romans with a .22-caliber rifle last year? He was also a budding hunter being trained by his father on prairie dogs say press reports.

Three days after the murder of Rev. Fred Winters of First Baptist Church in Maryville, Illinois, a group of gun owners in yellow T-shirts gathered outside the Illinois Statehouse hoping to visit with legislators and chanting “Concealed Carry Now.”

Referring to pending Illinois laws that would limit who can sell a gun and how many people can buy, Todd Vandermyde, an NRA lobbyist, said: “We’re not just going to lay down and take this stuff.”

Some of the recent gun victims would have said the same thing.

As Whitehouse Station, NJ-based Merck announces its purchase of Kenilworth, NJ-based Schering-Plough who remembers that it was a Merck/Schering-Plough combo that brought us Vytorin?

No one outside the scientific community had heard the term “surrogate endpoint” before Vytorin — a cholesterol drug that combined Merck’s statin drug Zocor (simvastatin) with Schering-Plough’s anti-hyperlipidemic drug Zetia (ezetimibe) — was marketed in 2004.

But it soon came to mean “the sun-was-in-my-eyes” as Merck/Schering-Plough sat on a Vytorin efficacy study for over a year tampering with its endpoints until Congress said time’s up in 2008. Surprise! Vytorin was no better at unclogging arteries than generic simvastatin at a fifth of the cost.

In fact Vytorin was so worthless, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the General Accounting Office to investigate why the FDA would approve a drug to reduce artery-clogging plaque that doesn’t reduce artery-clogging plaque.

Congressmen Bart Stupak (D-MI) and John Dingell (D-MI) asked why Schering-Plough executive VP Carrie Smith Cox unloaded $28 million stock between the end of the stonewalled study and release of its results. (Maybe her stint at fen phen and HRT plagued Wyeth taught her when to head for the exits.) And why the brat pack drug reps on Cafepharma seemed to know about the study’s results before the government!

States had questions of their own — especially as Schering-Plough paid $31 million to Missouri in 2008 for bilking Medicaid with a different drug three years earlier. Who can say incorrigible?

And New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo wondered whether the $21 million his state paid for Medicaid Vytorin prescriptions in only two years was Vioxx all over again as he sought to recoup $100 million from the first Merck scandal.

And it got worse. A second Vytorin study testing the drug’s effectiveness in aortic stenosis showed Vytorin worthless in preventing aortic-valve and cardiovascular events but with a macabre dividend: it increased the chances of getting and dying from cancer.

When the study results were integrated with two others trials, Vytorin only increased the risk of dying of cancer not getting it–whew! — and the FDA sounded an all-clear. But the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) said a cancer risk could not be discounted in a Sept. 2008 editorial.

The Vytorin scam came less than four years after the Vioxx scam in which Merck’s superaspirin taken by 20 million was withdrawn from the market for doubling heart attack and stroke risk in 2004.

Court documents show that Merck researchers were well acquainted with Vioxx’s “cardiovascular events” when they supplied the NEJM with phony heart attack data for the 2000 article that led to led its popularity and medical credibility. Oops

No wonder the NEJM filed a supporting brief in the recent Supreme Court Wyeth v. Levine case.

Who realizes today that up to 139,000 people had heart attacks and strokes on Vioxx and 50,000 died? Think ten Iraqs or one Vietnam.

Nor did Fosamax (alendronate) Merck’s bone wonder drug have a happy ending.

Despite Merck’s “awareness” campaign which increased the diagnosis of osteoporosis sevenfold thanks to bone density measuring machines planted in doctors’ offices, Fosamax was found to cause esophageal cancer, osteonecrosis (jaw bone death) and the very fractures it was supposed to prevent. It was listed on the FDA’s second quarterly Potential Signals of Serious Risks list. (See: forgiveness easier than permission)

Singular, Merck’s asthma drug is also on the ropes for suicidal side effects and parents are saying you want us to vaccinate our daughter with WHAT about its $400 cervical cancer drug Gardasil. (Who do you think paid for all the HPV “awareness” campaigns?)

Many are saying the drug companies need a new business model, having dealt themselves out of the game with their crash-and-burn blockbusters and with third party and Medicaid benefits managers saying “you’ve got to be kidding” about extravagant patent drugs.

Nor will they be shielded from lawsuits because they have FDA approval thanks to March’s Wyeth v. Levine ruling.

Will patients pay hundreds for the vaccines and biologics which drug companies hope will become their new gravy train? If they say Trust Us?

Seems Madeleine Pickens, wife of billionaire T. Boone Pickens, was about to gift the university’s Center for Veterinary Health Sciences $5 million until she learned of the repeat and terminal surgeries performed on man’s best friend in its labs and withdrew the largesse.

What she failed to understand, wrote irate vet students and faculty, was the only major organs removed in dog labs are reproductive ones!

The dogs–amassed by Class B dealers from pounds and surrendering owners–would be euthanized anyway!

Those “allowed to be recovered from anesthesia after organ removal” which is to say not killed are given pain meds!

Dogs not “allowed to be recovered from anesthesia after organ removal” don’t need pain meds!

All Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee regulations are followed! (see: room temperature; cage size; drinking water available.)

And dogs are sometimes given treats before the Big Sleep!

Even the vet school dean, Michael Lorenz, weighed in with a statement that “No more than two surgeries are performed on any dog.” Whew! — and also, “Terminal dog surgeries are used at the majority of the United States veterinary colleges.”

Gee, Mom. All the kids do it.

Of course veterinarians have always had to fight appearing like they love some animals more than others since so many of them eat the patients.

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) supports the “use of animals in research, testing, and education” and takes no public stand against trophy, canned hunting and child hunting. And, before heading the AVMA, Ron DeHaven presided over the killing of 87,000 coyotes, 6,000 foxes, and 2,500 bobcats a year as USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) administrator.

But University of California researchers are also having image problems.

A cabal of animal researchers in Santa Cruz and Berkeley is asking for public sympathy and free law enforcement protection for their animal experiments while refusing to disclosure what exactly the experiments are, their purpose or who they are.

The reason they want anonymity say researchers is the public can’t adequately judge science. Experiments that may look gory and cruel like the UCLA researcher who makes a midline incision in a live vervet monkey’s skull and drills 1.5mm-diameter holes for screws to give it “deep brain stimulation” could be taken the wrong way. Especially when the monkey becomes “acutely agitated,” defecating and urinating during the experiment.

In fact the researchers, many funded through the tax-supported National Institutes of Health, have a lot in common with Wall Street bankers. They want public money but don’t want to have to explain their work, account for their spending, or even show results–like the Northwestern researcher who has decorticated cats for 18 years. Do you know where your cat is?

No wonder researchers want animal advocates who demonstrate at their homes and reveal their identities silenced like the foursome the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested in February under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Kill the messenger!

To prove that it’s no longer safe to do whatever you want to animals in the name of science, researchers like to cite the case of Dario Ringach, an assistant professor of psychology and neurobiology at the University of California at Los Angeles who said he renounced animal research because of protests.

“You win,” wrote Ringach in a 2006 email announcing he would cease animal experiments including ones in which macaque monkeys are paralyzed, have coils glued to her eyes during a 120 hours procedure and subsequently killed says UCLA Primate Freedom.

But Ringach’s compatriots need to do better research.

In the January 12, 2009 Nature Neuroscience, Ringach reports an experiment in which he and three other authors record spikes and local field potentials “from multi-electrode arrays that were implanted in monkey and cat primary visual cortex.”

Seems it was a short renunciation.