If you take heartburn drugs (and about a fifth of Canadians do) you might want to sit up and take notice of the recent work of a courageous member of Parliament.
James Lunney, the MP for Nanaimo-Alberni, recently took a principled and vocal stand on a widely prescribed class of drugs to treat heartburn called proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), which include omeprazole (Losec), pantoprazole (Pantaloc) and esomeprazole (Nexium), and their link to the development of C. difficile, a nasty and sometimes fatal infection.
At the press conference in Ottawa on Wednesday, Lunney reminded us that there are an estimated 1,400 deaths per year in Canada related to C. difficile and that the connection to PPIs has been known for at least a decade.
In the past few years, research on these drugs carried out by independent researchers in the Drug Safety and Effectiveness Network (including some researchers here in Victoria) have concluded that the use of PPIs is “quite strongly associated with an increased risk of C. difficile.” In other words, the drugs are potentially dangerous and could kill you.
Lunney is asking Health Canada to put stronger warnings on this class of drugs. He pointed to what many of us in the drug-safety world have known for a long time: The regulator is almost useless in providing meaningful drug-safety messages directly to Canadians.
Not only do PPIs lead some patients to develop C. difficile, they are linked to cardiac arrhythmias, pneumonia, vitamin deficiencies and bone fractures.
Yet the warnings we have received from Health Canada have been delivered in the lamest, most opaque way possible. Health Canada, the agency charged with keeping Canadians safe, says there is only a “possible association,” “possible link” and that a “definite association has not been confirmed” between PPIs and C. difficile.
You almost wonder whose side they are on, but this is the kind of weaselly wording we’ve come to expect from an agency that sees the pharmaceutical industry as its client and the rest of us as mere “other stakeholders.”
Lunney is right: we need clear and unambiguous drug-safety warnings. These drugs are widely used in this country and have likely led to 14,000 deaths in Canada over the past decade. It’s a shame a single MP has to stand up and say what Health Canada has needed to say for more than 10 years.
Alan Cassels is a University of Victoria drug-policy researcher and the author of Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease.
