Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

Germany, particularly for use in children. When the British company
thought they would market a similar one, their pharmacologist was
horrified to find out how very toxic this compound was. I can still
remember his anguish when he described experiments he had done.
It was a micronized preparation in a sweet solution. Despite his
findings, however, it was marketed for a while in Britain. As I
understand it, the preparation was taken off the market because of
some toxicity in humans, but we didn’t know this. The application
was resubmitted again on January the 17th, which meant that by
mid-March we would have to give them another opinion. We were
continually concerned about the lack of data on metabolism,
excretion, absorption, and this curious lack of toxicity. Then, at the
end of February – the 23rd, I think it was, actually – we picked up a
number – it was actually the December 30th number – of the British
Medical Journal, which contained Florence’s article posing the
question, did thalidomide cause peripheral neuritis? This was a little
late in getting to us, because the mail was on strike. It was actually a
shipping strike, I think, and we did not get our British and other
foreign publications by airmail in those days. However, this did come
in time. When we questioned the company about it, they said they
had just seen that, too. They were sort of surprised, and were going
over to Europe to find out more, and would let us know when they
came back. Now, what we didn’t know, again, was the German
company had been questioned about peripheral neuritis as early as
the winter of December of 1959, before our application was even
submitted. The same person that asked them about it this time gave
a paper – I believe it was in May of 1960 – describing a number of
cases of peripheral neuritis, some of which seemed pretty severe.
The British actually answered the first report by saying that they were
aware of it, and had put some reference to it in the material that they
distributed with the drug. Our company was not obliged to submit
foreign supporting material or material of that type at that time, so we
were not aware of this side effect. They had independently
discovered it about May of 1960, and there is good evidence that the
German and the British company had a sort of gentleman’s
agreement to keep the matter rather quiet until the American
company had a chance to get the drug on the market. So we were
inclined to believe that the American company had not heard of this
earlier. The company did report to us on their trip to Europe. They
said that indeed there did seem to be some cases that neither in
Germany nor in England were it considered of great moment, and