Rare cancers in kids linked to these meds

They are some of the best-selling drugs to come out of Big Pharma’s laboratories. And they are also some of the deadliest.

I’m talking about TNF inhibitors — meds that include Humira, Enbrel, and Remicade — prescribed for autoimmune conditions such as RA and psoriasis.

Take Humira, for example. It comes with a big black-box warning about “serious infections and malignancy,” including a “rare” kind of lymphoma that’s turned up in adolescents.

These drugs are horrific enough where adults are concerned, so you would think that children would be kept as far from them as they are cartons of cigarettes and lighters!

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. And as hard as it is to believe, kids — even toddlers — are being injected with them. Why, two years ago, the FDA gave the OK for Enbrel to be given to children as young as 4 years old to treat psoriasis.

Now, we’re hearing from a group of Canadian doctors that is warning parents and other physicians that “long-term” cancer screenings should be mandatory for children taking TNF meds.

Certainly, if you’re a parent or grandparent of a child suffering from one of these devastating conditions, questioning their doctor can be extremely difficult. But the best way to keep a child you love from becoming the next TNF-inhibitor cancer victim is to never let them get one of these risky drugs in the first place.

Cancer in a syringe?

In their report, the Canadian doctors refer to the patients who died in their hospital during treatment with TNF inhibitors not by name, but with letters.

Take “Patient A,” for instance. She was given Enbrel for less than three years when a tumor was discovered on her brain stem. She was only 17 when she died.

Patient E had been taking Enbrel and Remicade for under two years when she developed T-cell lymphoma. A bone marrow transplant didn’t work, and she passed away at 16.

Patient D was only 16 when he was diagnosed with a rare type of head and neck cancer. He had been receiving Remicade.

But these aren’t just interesting cases for pediatric rheumatologists to mull over. They’re brothers and sisters, sons and daughters with loving parents who believed that they were doing the very best for their children.

Sadly, this is far from the first time TNF inhibitors have been mentioned in the same breath as cancer. And each and every time, drugmakers have managed to somehow make a detour around those warnings, giving parents a false sense of security that the worst won’t happen to their child.

In 2003, an FDA advisory panel sounded the alarm about an “incurable” lymph cancer.

And a decade ago, the FDA announced that it was “investigating” whether four TNF meds (the top three I mentioned plus another called Cimzia) were linked to deadly childhood lymphomas. At that time, the agency already had reports of dozens of pediatric cancer cases connected to these drugs.

In the years since that FDA “investigation” took place, pharma-friendly researchers have done their best to confused the issue, even saying that a study found that it’s the diseases (and not the drugs) that are causing these childhood malignancies! And that claim must have worked, because Humira is now said to be the world’s best-selling drug.

But even the FDA still wants answers, so the agency is requiring drugmakers to keep score on how many cancers are reported – what’s known as “postmarketing research.”

And the one for pediatric cancers? Unbelievably, that’s not scheduled to finish up until around 2020. I would call that proof that the FDA thinks of our children not as patients, but lab rats!

Whatever the end tally may be, each death will represent someone’s dear child who had their time on earth cut short by an unnecessary and dangerous drug.

While all autoimmune diseases are still basically a mystery, we do know that inflammation plays a major role in them, and that following an anti-inflammatory diet is a must for sufferers.

So is finding a doctor with up-to-date knowledge of the many safe and natural treatments available for their conditions, rather than one who simply relies on a drug that’s been linked to so many horrible and life-destroying side effects.

“Monitor kids on TNF inhibitors for rare cancers” Nancy Walsh, March 20, 2018, Medpage Today, medpagetoday.com