The blog with no name

One of the new services provided by Google is Google Trends, I know that everyone is playing with it at the moment which is not surprising as it provides hours, well at least minutes of entertainment.
For instance, if I look up Beethoven it tells me that the top three countries interested in it are Chile, Mexico and Hungary. Mozart is mostly searched in Austria, Spain and Hungary while Verdi in Italy, Germany and Norway. Chopin is seached in Poland, Singapore and France and Schubert in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Frank Sinatra and the Beatles are very popular in South America and Elvis Presley must have a revival in Chile and Scandinavia. Pink Floyd also do well in Chile, Argentina and Italy while Bob Dylan scores highly In Ireland, Norway and Sweden. Newest things like the Arctic Monkeys are seached in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand.
I leave it like this as I could go on for a very long time but it is all pointless information after all.

As usual I am not surprised at all by the latest revelations:

Britain's bestselling antidepressant, Seroxat, can cause adults as well as children to become suicidal, according to the manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline.

GSK, which for years denied there was a problem with the drug, has sent a letter to all doctors in Britain warning of the potential risk in some adult patients. The company has reanalysed data from the clinical trials of the drug and found that significantly more adults who were given Seroxat became suicidal than those given a placebo. Seroxat has been banned from use in children by the UK drug regulator for the same reason. The revelation came as the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, declared the end of the "Prozac nation" yesterday, launching a programme to cut the numbers of patients on drugs such as Prozac and Seroxat and extend counselling to the thousands of people with mild to moderate depression and anxiety......David Healy, professor of psychiatry and director of the north Wales department of psychological medicine, who has for years called for warnings about the suicide risk of SSRIs, said yesterday that GSK had been in possession of the statistics it was now making public for at least 15 years."Seroxat has a severe withdrawal syndrome, which seems to me to be worse than for other drugs in the group, and the withdrawal syndrome in its own right is linked to people becoming suicidal," he said.

Full article

I'm interested in this because I believe that pharmaceutical companies have to maximise profits.
To do that they might have to sell drugs that are useless and/or dangerous, Therefore this kind of news are not very surprising, it is one of the major flaws of modern capitalism, profit is the mother of invention, which is a good thing, but is also the main determining factor on all business decisions.
It might work quite well with telecoms suppliers or car manufacturers but it does not work very well when we are talking about our health.