Last night, 6" of rain fell on our already soaked and flooded part of the world. Just a couple of days ago, we had an even harder overnight rain that caused flash flooding all over our little North Georgia County. So the ground was already saturated for last night’s spectacle. The power, television service, and Internet come and go as ancient oaks lose their grip and just topple to the ground. We all make Noah jokes and the routines of life grind to a halt. My usual morning fare of researching this and that becomes impossible and I’m left to things unassisted by modern tools.
This is a nearby valley where the Long Swamp Creek usually trickles along, only a few feet wide. It’s the site of the first treaty the newly formed United States of America made with the Native Americans in 1794 [also the first treaty we broke shortly thereafter]. Today, it’s an inland waterway on the national news programs.
And speaking of flooding, when the Internet comes on, there are hundreds of comments coming from someplace in the world advertising Louis Vuitton [knock off] Handbags that have some way of mutating gmail addresses and sender names so they get around the spam filter. I’ve turned off the comments in hopes that the human or machine generating them will tire of its fun and move on. Sorry, but for the moment, this is a comment-free blog. So I guess the Morton Salt girl is right – when it rains, it pours.
I actually had a topic I wanted to look into today – Levomilnacipran [Fetzima, Forest Laboratories], the antidepressant approved last week by the FDA. It’s actually not the drug itself that caught my attention. It’s ancient history, having been bought and sold for years. Forest Laboratories finally eked out an approval for this lackluster SNRI. The thing that caught my attention was the article by Michael Thase writing about it in Medscape. What I was thinking about was people like Michael Thase or Madhukar Trevidi whose articles appear about almost every drug that gets approved. They are members of a special subset, KOLs on steroids, authors on hundreds of industry generated clinical trial articles, COI declarations that are encyclopedic, and strong representation on every other index of industry affiliation. They are members of a genre of full academic professors who are apparently available for hire for PHARMA drug promotion. In my mind, I call them pharma·whores [I can’t think of a more acceptable moniker]. I wanted to try to figure out why academic departments tolerate such people. But, alas, that will have to wait for another day when the Internet sticks around and the comment generator somewhere in the world finds another target.
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