The 60 year old thalidomide cover-up

[SIDURI]

27. Americans Dr Frances Kelsey and Sherri Finkbine deserve a statue in the US

One for keeping it out of this country and the other for speaking out about her own case so that other women would be alerted to the danger if they had obtained the drug abroad. These were/are courageous American women.

I don't believe there has been a cover-up in the US. It is simply that the populace as a whole is pathetically ignorant of the history of public health.

I remember the last great polio epidemic and how it killed and maimed children; I remember that no public school was without a couple of kids stumping along in heavy braces and boots. Kids in wheelchairs were not in public schools. The really unlucky survivors lay in "iron lungs."

Yet it is possible to generate an enormous online flame war in some places by standing up for vaccinations for infants and children -- because my fellow citizens have not been taught the rudiments of the history of public health and they simply have no idea what they are talking about.

Thalidomide? I remember that, too. The weekly LIFE magazine was where you could find photos not only of hospital wards with rows of kids in iron lungs from polio, but photos of babies without arms and legs from Thalidomide. I was very young, but that kind of thing made a major impression on me.

There's no need for a cover-up in the good old USA when people are simply bloody ignorant of science. The information is in the library, if nothing else. However, it should be taught in every grade of public school.

Oddly enough, the drug that did so much damage to fetuses was repurposed a couple of decades later to fight leprosy. With big fat warning labels, you bet. But it turned out to have a use after all.

Siduri