TV News LIES

More than a quarter of children and teens in the United States are taking a medication on a regular basis. Close to seven percent are on two or more prescription drugs.

Prescribing medications to children can cause problems; many of them have not had their effects on children researched.

Even in ones that have, the consequences of using them over the course of a lifetime is usually unknown.

U.S. health regulators are requesting a limit on the amount of acetaminophen in prescription pain medicines in an effort to curb the risk of liver damage.

The move announced on on Thursday aims to limit combination drugs such as the opioids Percocet and Vicodin to 325 milligrams of acetaminophen per pill and calls for them to carry a "black box" warning about potential liver failure.

2010 will go down as the year the diet pill Meridia and pain pill Darvon were withdrawn from the market and the heart-attack associated diabetes drug Avandia was severely restricted.

But it was also the year the Justice Department filed the first criminal, not civil, charges against a drug company executive. Lauren Stevens, a former VP and assistant general counsel at GlaxoSmithKline, hid some 1,000 instances of GSK-paid doctors illegally promoting Wellbutrin to other doctors, say authorities.

...Urging Both Scientists and Journalists to Do More Thorough Research Into Vaccines and Autism.

Last week, an article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), written by a freelance newspaper reporter, Brian Deer, created a media firestorm in the United States. In his article, Brian Deer accuses Dr. Andrew Wakefield of deliberate fraud regarding his 1998 case series, which was published in the British journal, The Lancet.  Dr. Wakefield reported that the children in his case series were suffering from a novel form of bowel disease and that parents reported a temporal link between the onset of symptoms and receipt of the MMR vaccine. Contrary to what has been reported in the media over the years, Dr. Wakefield never stated that the MMR vaccine caused autism. The full text of the original paper is available at www.generationrescue.org.

In the past year, Pima County, Ariz., where Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others were shot Saturday, has seen more than 45 percent of its mental health services recipients forced off the public rolls, a service advocate told The Huffington Post.

The deep cuts in treatment were protested strongly at the time, with opponents warning that they would result in a spike in suicide attempts, public disturbances, hospitalizations and brushes with the police.

Common painkillers such as ibuprofen and diclofenac as well as branded pain drugs from Pfizer Inc, Merck & Co Inc and Novartis AG can increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, a review found on Wednesday.

Scientists from Bern University in Switzerland analyzed data from 31 trials involving more than 116,000 patients taking either naproxen, ibuprofen, diclofenac, Pfizer's Celebrex, or celecoxib, Merck's Arcoxia, or etoricoxib, Merck's Vioxx, or rofecoxib, Novartis' Prexige, or lumiracoxib, or a placebo, to try to give an estimate of the heart risks of such medicines.