thalidomide
Noun
Meaning
thalidomide (countable and uncountable, plural thalidomides)
(pharmacology) A drug sold during the late 1950s and early 1960s as a sleeping aid, and to pregnant women as an antiemetic to combat morning sickness and other symptoms, but withdrawn as causing severe birth defects, such as phocomelia; currently used to treat leprosy.
Synonyms
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Examples
Although thalidomide was never approved for sale in the United States at the time, millions of tablets had been distributed to physicians during a clinical testing program.
But to reach the truth about thalidomide, or, rather, to be able to publish it, involved a clutch of tangled and thorny legal and ethical issues that took years of patience, cunning and tireless research to unravel.
Furthermore, it took a while to install a Surgeon General in Germany; the Federal Ministry of Health (Germany) was not founded until 1962, some months after thalidomide was banned from the market.
By the mid 1950s, 14 pharmaceutical companies were marketing thalidomide in 46 countries under 37 (some reports suggest 51) different trade names.
Carcinogenicity Animal studies did not demonstrate any carcinogenicity even when rats and mice were exposed to up to 11 times the therapeutic dose of thalidomide.
First, state controls and safeguarding were poor; indeed, it was not until 2008 that the government even admitted the country had ever imported thalidomide.