A blood-coagulating drug designed to treat rare forms of hemophilia is being used on critically wounded U.S. troops in Iraq despite evidence it can cause clots that lead to strokes, heart attacks and death in other patients, The (Baltimore) Sun reported for Sunday's editions.
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The Food and Drug Administration said in a warning last December that giving Factor VII to patients who don't have the blood disorder could cause strokes and heart attacks. Its researchers published a study in January blaming 43 deaths on clots that developed after injections of Factor VII.
However, the Army medical command considers it a medical breakthrough that gives front-line physicians a way to control deadly bleeding. Physicians in Iraq have injected it into more than 1,000 patients, reported The Sun, which makes its first Sunday edition available Saturday afternoon.
"When it works, it's amazing," said Col. John B. Holcomb, an Army trauma surgeon and commander of the Army's Institute of Surgical Research. "It's one of the most useful new tools we have."
So basically the Army is using the drug "off-label" because they believe that it's possibly efficacious with no studies to show the long-term effects on non-hemophiliac patients? Wow.
Military medicine in combat is always a challenge, and I certainly want to see injured troops getting the best care, but I don't think that means getting an off-label treatment that could potentially cause them problems greater than the injury they are getting treated for.
If the military wants to use this drug, then they ought to get together with NIH and fund a long-term study of the effects of the drug on the population they are using it on. It would not be fast, and it might make the drug less available, but it might save more lives in the long run than not.
Our soldiers do not deserve to become guinea pigs in this war just for the sake of expediency; and make no mistake that's what's going on here when over 1,000 doses have been administered with no idea of the long-term effects of the medication and a record of ill-effects are being found.
Nothing about this misbegotten war shocks me much anymore, but this is just another facet of 'what in the fuck are they thinking'. I really don't know anymore. You would think that the the Preznit would say "don't do that", but in administration that hates science and scientific fact look for the inevitable attack on critics as "hating the troops" etc etc ad nauseum.
