Scandal Over Mediator, a French Weight-Loss Drug, Prompts Calls for Wide Changes

Oops.

In 33 years on pharmacy shelves here, the diabetes drug Mediator was prescribed to an estimated five million French patients, many of them diabetics, many others hoping simply to lose weight. When French authorities ordered the drug off the market in 2009, alerted to possible cardiovascular risks, there were 300,000 active prescriptions.

Mediator and its enigmatic French manufacturer, Laboratoires Servier, a privately held company with a troubled past, find themselves at the center of France’s largest public-health scandal in at least a decade. Health officials estimate that as many as 2,000 people died, with thousands more hospitalized, victims of cardiac valve damage and pulmonary hypertension apparently linked to the drug.

Politicians and the press have pilloried Servier, charging that it concealed the dangers of Mediator for decades and insisting that the company has a wider history of disregarding health concerns about its products. Many have noted that two Servier weight-loss products, both closely related to Mediator, were at the center of the fen-phen scandal of the late 1990s in the United States.

Bummer.