Watchdog Bytes

That hand sanitizer not so sanitary

Before rubbing a couple of dollups of Clarcon skin sanitizer on your hands, have a backup hand sanitizer ready to immediately scrub the stuff off.

Seems Clarcon products are teeming with potentially disease-causing bacteria, which the company products were supposed to destroy.

Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration sent U.S. marshals to seize all skin sanitizers and skin protectants from Clarcon Biological Chemical Laboratory in Roy, Utah.

Formidable-sounding products such as Iron Fist Barrier Hand Treatment, Dermasentials DermaBarrier, Antimicrobial Hand Sanitizer, Skin Shield Industrial and Total Skin Care Work contain harmful bacteria that may cause opportunistic skin and tissue infections, according to the FDA.

Such infections may need medical or surgical attention and may result in permanent damage.

Clarcon earlier had voluntarily recalled the products, which were distributed in multiple regions of the country since 2007.

Still have a bottle? Throw it away.

--Darren Barbee

Be careful about trusting those medical articles

Nothing says “trust me, take this pill” quite like putting your name on a medical article that you didn’t actually write.

Allegations are that medical ghostwriting was used to promote products of pharmaceutical giant Wyeth.

It hired a company called DesignWrite to draft articles for medical journals promoting the company’s horomone therapy products.

DesignWrite sought “academic investigators” to be listed as the primary authors of the articles they reviewed. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is investigating.

He’s concerned that doctors could be misled to prescribe treatments that may not work or could harm patients.

The company told Watchdog that no ethics policies were violated because it has physicians and PhDs on its writing staff and other physicians who lent their names were in control of the articles.

-- Darren Barbee

“Some people are trying to paint a picture that DesignWrite and the medical writing industry as a whole are presenting inaccurate scientific and medical information,” the company said in an e-mail to Watchdog.

“That simply is not true. DesignWrite stands by the medical and scientific validity of every article in which it has participated. For all articles, the physician author had total control over the finished product and final approval of the finished product. This fact has been confirmed by the authors as well as independent 3rd parties.”

So, if the articles were valid, and the company’s writing staff included those experts, why did it need need other investigators to sign their names?

Your tax dollars paying the rent for sex offenders

Want to help pay the rent for convicted sex offenders?

Taxpayers are doing just that, according to a recent federal report. Thousands of convicted sex offenders are living in subsidized public housing in violation of the law, says the report by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Congress banned offenders from the housing in 1998, after a 9-year-old girl was molested by a convicted sex offender in her housing complex.

But lifetime registered sex offenders are living in as many as 3,046 HUD-financed households — including 36 convicted of rape, sexual assault, lewd or lascivious acts and sexual abuse of children, according to the inspector general.

How did that happen?

HUD did not have adequate controls, monitoring, and authority to ensure that housing projects and housing authorities identified offenders and kept them out, the report found. HUD counters that only 0.07 percent of households include a sex offender.

Watchdog says to tell that to the people who live next door.

-- Darren Barbee