Daily papers seem to feel the crunch and publish adverts now as front page news. AstraZeneca just spent handsomely to get its product Crestor into the headlines and onto front pages. To all intent, they try to drug and poison us all now.

Crestor is a product from the same family as Lipitor from Pfizer, and Lipobay (in Europe) or Baycol (in the United States) by Bayer. The latter has already been taken off the market as a killer drug. Now AstraZeneca is obviously trying to maximise is profits in drug peddling by announcing Crestor the wonder-drug of all times.

In a single test series with this statin, they claim to have reduced the possibilities of both heart attacks and strokes by nearly 50 per cent. As I haven’t falsified their statistics myself, therefore I don’t know how they managed that. They claim it has to do with a protein hsCRP (high sensitivity C-reactive protein) which allegedly has a link to inflammations of the arteries.

In the test, not only patients were drugged, but also completely healthy participants. They now claim that it helped both groups to slash down heart attack and stroke figures. It is quite obvious that the only reason for such a claim is to open the market to everybody including toddlers. Get them while their young, then all will be junkies.

Apart from these high flying claims, the tests left out a few minor informations which could have been quite interesting. It does not show any statistics on the side effects, such as muscle decrease or weakening (Rhabdomyolisis), neuromuscular problems (Myopathy), liver damage (Hepatotoxicity), malfunction of the thyroid gland (Hypothyreosis), and kidney disorders. It fails to mention that the product is not to be prescribed to persons of Chinese or Japanese descent, to pregnant women, and to women in general before the menopause. It also ignores the fact that on 19th January, 2005, AstraZeneca has reported the death of a patient through Crestor.

I failed to find any long term study results, too. It seems just one more of these pharmaceutical hook-ups, where incomplete information is presented as great news.

The prescription of Crestor is already completely forbidden in Germany.

There are already 4 million Crestor drug addicts in England and Wales alone, a further use of this drug would push addicts up by 1.5 million again. Considering the present turn-over of £729 million, do you wonder that the money is well spent by AstraZeneca for these front pages advertising news?

My favourite sentence in the whole advertising campaign was coined by a flunky called Jenny Hope, texting the front page ad for the Daily Mail: ‘Those taking Crestor, also known as rosuvastatin, were actually 20 per cent less likely to die from any cause.’ Eternal life, here I come.