Archive find backs claims over birth defect drug

NEW evidence about a pregnancy test drug linked to thousands of birth defects bolsters claims of an alleged cover-up, an MP has said.

Hundreds of files relating to Primodos, a hormone test prescribed to expectant mothers in the 1960s and 1970s, were uncovered by Sky News at Germany’s Berlin National Archive last year.

Among them were findings in January 1975 by the UK’s then principal medical officer that women who took a hormone pregnancy test had a “five-to-one risk” of having a child with birth defects.

The test has been officially linked to more than 3,500 women whose babies suffered birth defects.

Sky News said Dr William Inman, of the Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM), reportedly wrote to the drug’s manufacturer Schering, and warned them to “take measures to avoid medico-legal problems” and later that he had destroyed his research to avoid “individual claims”.

A letter from Dr Inman published in the British Medical Journal in April the same year said the committee had... had only a small number of reports alleging a possible association between ‘the use of drugs during pregnancy and the subsequent delivery of a malformed child”.

His letter concluded there was “little justification” for the ongoing use of such tests when alternatives were available.

The medical regulator was notified about the potential link in 1967, but did not issue warnings until 1975.

Labour MP Yasmin Qureshi said: “The CSM seems to have known this drug was causing problems but did nothing.

“It was years before they said it should come off the market.”