Dear Mel
Call me pedantic if you will, but what's the point of having the URL and the
article in the same posting? Couldn't you save a lot of bandwidth and have
one or the other?
Robert
----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 09:19
Subject: Murder and Medication?
The following news report on the tragic case of American murders involving
Paxil (Prozac) appeared a few days ago in The Guardian newpaper in UK:
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,503594,00.html>
----------------------------------------
Drug 'drove father to kill family'
Sarah Boseley, health editor
Friday June 8, 2001
The Guardian
The family of a man who killed his wife, daughter and baby granddaughter
before committing suicide has been awarded $6.4m (£4.2m) by a jury which
ruled that the antidepressant Paxil - the British-owned version of Prozac -
was to blame.
Donald Schell, 60, was on Paxil, made by the British drug giant,
GlaxoSmithKline, for just two days after a diagnosis of mild depression. In
the early hours of February 12 1998, he shot and killed his wife Rita, his
daughter Deborah Tobin and her one month-old baby Alyssa.
Lawyers for the Tobin family successfully argued that his homicide and
suicide were totally out of character. The jury, in Wyoming district court
in
Cheyenne, USA, took three and a half hours at the end of a two-week trial to
decide that Paxil was 80% to blame.
The verdict will have major repercussions. It is the first time a jury has
blamed one of the SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) class of
drugs for causing violent acts. The manufacturers have always claimed that
depression is responsible for the violence. GlaxoSmithKline says it rejects
the verdict and will appeal, arguing that Paxil has been subjected to
rigorous clinical trials.
But evidence was presented in Wyoming by a British psychiatrist, David
Healy,
that a significant proportion of healthy volunteers could become seriously
agitated and potentially suicidal on the drug. Yesterday he called for the
Medicines Control Agency in the UK to act. "It is clear that physicians who
use these drugs need to be warned about the hazards," he said.
--------------------------------------
Dr Mel C Siff
Denver, USA
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Supertraining/
|