Trasylol: the worldwide cover-up that killed thousands
For decades, one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies ignored dangerous side-effects of Trasylol, one of their most profitable, widely used drugs used by surgeons to prevent excessive bleeding and counter the need to administer blood transfusions.
While operations involving Trasylol appeared to be successful, patients are shown to have suffered heart attacks, strokes or severe kidney damage at the hands of the drug.
Many of those who did not die were left facing a lifetime on dialysis.
Costing $1000 a dose, Trasylol was used across Australia at major hospitals for two decades before it was approved by the TGA.
It was another 15 years before it was finally taken off the market.
Despite the mounting medical evidence about the human death toll Trasylol was causing, the household-name drug company did nothing, even withholding its own bombshell research from drug regulators.
Australian nurse Jenny Lloyd has been on a lifelong mission to find out what happened to her super-fit, healthy, 30-year-old father David, who died suddenly following a routine operation in 1978.
"[This company] took our world away," she said.
"Why didn't they give the side effects out to people?"
In the United States, thousands of law suits have been launched and the drug company has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars.
Tens of thousands of Australian families who lost a loved one to stroke, heart attack or kidney failure will not know that the cause of their pain and loss could be because of Trasylol.
Not one cent has been paid to victims and for the vast majority, it is too late to start.
This week, Sunday Night exposes one of the biggest worldwide medical cover-ups in recent history. Sunday, 8:15pm.
