ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2009 - 5

SAN ANTONIO--New data from the U.S. federally funded Women's Health Initiative, presented at the December 2008 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, promises to further erode the popularity of estrogen supplements derived from pregnant mares' urine.

Taking the supplements for five years doubles women's risk of contracting breast cancer, reported a research team headed by Rowan Chlebowski, M.D., of the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

"The Women's Health Initiative study had two parts," explained Marilynn Marchione of Associated Press. "In one, 16,608 women closely matched for age, weight and other health factors were randomly assigned to take either Wyeth Pharmaceuticals' Prempro," combining estrogen and progestin, "or dummy pills. This part was halted when researchers saw a 26% higher risk of breast cancer among those on Prempro. But that was an average over the five and a half years that the women were on the pills. For the new study, researchers tracked 15,387 of these women through July 2005, and plotted breast cancer cases as they occurred over time.

"They saw a clear trend," Marchione summarized. "Risk rose with the start of use, peaked when the study ended, and fell as nearly all hormone users stopped taking their pills. At the peak, the breast cancer risk for pill takers was twice that of the others."

The findings were announced on the same day that Duff Wilson of the New York Times disclosed that "Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company, paid ghostwriters to produce medical journal articles favorable to Prempro, according to letters sent electronically by Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) seeking more information about the company's involvement in medical ghostwriting. At least one article was published even after a federal study found the drug raised the risk of breast cancer. The letters ask

i Wyeth and DesignWrite, a medical writing firm, to disclose payments related to the preparation of journal articles and the activities of doctors who were recruited to put their names on them for publication.

"Grassley's staff on the Senate Finance Committee released dozens of pages of internal corporate documents gathered from lawsuits showing the central, previously. undisclosed role of Wyeth and DesignWrite in creating articles promoting hormone therapy for menopausal women as far back as 1997," wrote Wilson.

"The documents show company executives came up with ideas for medical journal articles, titled them, drafted outlines, paid writers to draft the manuscripts, recruited academic authors and identified publications to run the articles—all without disclosing the companies' roles to journal editors or readers."

Grassley's staff "were given the documents about a month ago by James F. Szaller, a personal injury lawyer in Cleveland," reported Wilson.

Estrogen drugs made from pregnant mares' urine have been marketed for more than 60 years, and were the basis of the first commercially distributed human birth control pills. The humane community voiced two major concerns about the industry from inception. One was that it involves keeping large numbers of pregnant mares artificially closely confined; to collect their urine, with little opportunity for normal movement and exercise. The other was that impregnating the mares year after year to collect their urine creates a surplus Afoals, most of whom were and are sold to slaughter after a few months at pasture.

Prempro is the most recent popular drug based on Premarin, the longtime top-selling estrogen supplement. Under boycott by animal advocacy groups worldwide since shortly after ANIMAL PEOPLE published investigative findings by the Canadian Farm Animal Concerns Trust in April 1993, Premarin was still the top-selling prescription drug worldwide in 2001, with sales of $3 billion. Sales began to fall after the Women's Health Initiative in July 2002 reported that the Premarin component of Prempro appears to be associated with increased risk from heart attacks; strokes, and blood clots forming in the lungs.